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https://www.fastcodesign.com/3061519/evidence/the-ux-secret-that-will-ruin-apps-for-you
companies introduce what Kowitz calls an "artificial waiting" pattern into their interfaces. These are status bars, maybe a few update messages, to construct a facade of slow, hard, thoughtful work, even though the computer is done calculating your query.
[...] "My guys built this tool—it took single digit milliseconds to get the results back. And it was giving [accurate] results, not just some plan we wanted to sell them," Hoober says. "But when we tested with people, they assumed it was all marketing bullshit because it was instantaneous. They'd say, 'This was obviously a canned result, I'm just gonna shop myself.'"
"Coinstar is a great example of this. The machine is able to calculate the total change deposited almost instantly. Yet, during testing the company learned that consumers did not trust the machines. Customers though it was impossible for a machine to count change accurately at such a high rate. Faced with the issues of trust and preconceived expectations of necessary effort, the company began to rework the user experience. The solution was fairly simple. The machine still counted at the same pace but displayed the results at a significantly slower rate. In fact, the sound of change working the way through the machine is just a recording that is played through a speaker. Altering the user experience to match expectations created trust and met the customers expectation of the necessary effort to complete the task."
Not long ago I removed a delay in some old software that didn't seem to do anything (it still works and works faster). Perhaps I should add the delay back...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 03 2016, @01:43AM
Any version from Win95 all the way up to Win10 has the slowest update I've ever seen. Ubuntu's synaptic package manager gets shit done in 1/100th the time. Heck, in the time it takes Windows to do an update, I could install Ubuntu from scratch in less time.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 03 2016, @01:52AM
Windows updates can roll back if they fail. Synaptic just shits itself and leaves you no options except reinstalling from scratch. Windows users don't want to have to reinstall every other month.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 03 2016, @02:14AM
WRONG. You can roll back an update. I had to do that only one time in the last 6 years of using Ubuntu. It was an update that borked network manager ONLY because I had the "proposed updates" box checked.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 03 2016, @02:50AM
Not to mention the Windows updates that brick your computer, some part in it, or peripherals.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 03 2016, @01:53AM
Maybe that's why Windows is so popular. Everyone considers its sloth a good thing ...
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 03 2016, @02:04AM
I read an article about how that is actually bad design on Microsoft's part. For example, they check numerous settings that only need to be checked before each individual update in a loop inside the same code as their spinlock. So not only does the CPU just spin away doing nothing on one thread, but it also causes higher load on other CPUs due to the side effects of those checks. Another is that their update system uses a graph to check dependencies and, rather than just checking whether the latest requirements are met, it checks the entire tree, which can be gigabytes in size and then, because the svchost process it uses doesn't exit, that can stay mapped in memory for a long time until it is finally paged out. In the mean time, that causes your computer to potentially thrash while checking for updates and be generally slow as it tries to move the unneeded parts out of memory.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 03 2016, @01:36PM
Like I said, all of these are intentionally placed artificial delays intended to make Microsoft seem more reliable and trustworthy. It makes people buy Windows because they all think it works so hard.
(Score: 2) by Hyperturtle on Saturday September 03 2016, @02:45PM
Windows 95 didn't come out with automatic updates. That was introduced later and popularized in the release of Windows 98, I thought... Windows NT 4.0 (both server and workstation) didn't have automatic updates, either -- those were the days when someone actually made a thoughtful decision as to if they would install the patches, and how many of them, and on what hardware.
By leaving it up to me, it was both the fastest and slowest method out of them all! Because if I cared it would take a while while I did my research, and if I felt lucky I just pressed the buttons and hoped for the best, based on previous experiences or blind trust/faith that the update would work.
From what I have heard about the updates in windows 10, none of my strategies are applicable.
(Score: 3, Informative) by AthanasiusKircher on Saturday September 03 2016, @06:34PM
Windows 95 didn't come out with automatic updates. That was introduced later and popularized in the release of Windows 98, I thought... Windows NT 4.0 (both server and workstation) didn't have automatic updates, either -- those were the days when someone actually made a thoughtful decision as to if they would install the patches, and how many of them, and on what hardware.
Actually, true "automatic updates" didn't happen until Windows ME [wikipedia.org]. Windows 98 had a "Critical Update Notification Tool" which could be installed to check the Windows Update server periodically for "critical" updates, but it wasn't until ME that "automatic updates" that downloaded by themselves happened. Even then, I'm not sure precisely when the feature to "install automatically" happened -- I believe you were still prompted in ME first. The auto install feature may not have happened until XP (?).