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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.”