The accuracy of loading bars has long been a joke: reaching 66% takes mere moments, but 99% to 100% feels endless. Yet, progress bars—designed to offer “operational transparency”—play a key psychological role in building trust and satisfaction.
A lot of business and marketing research has gone into identifying ways to improve idle wait times to positively alter the perceptions of waiting customers. However, a 2011 Harvard Business School study looked instead at how to improve the perceptions of the ‘active’ service time, after that wait.
A lot of research has gone in to identifying ways to improve idle wait times, often focusing on speeding up processes or distracting customers during delays. However, a 2011 Harvard Business School study took a different angle: after the wait, how can we improve perceptions of the ‘active’ service time.
Coining the effect ‘the labour illusion’, they found that, “people actually prefer websites with longer waits to those that return instantaneous results—even when those results are identical”, provided they can see visible signs of effort and progress being made (full text pdf). The study explains:
offering services that arrive too quickly or too easily can have costs. In particular, customers draw inferences from their in-process experiences about the value being created. […] Consumers may use service duration as a heuristic to assess its quality, [which] is rooted in the notion that service quality increases with time spent with the service provider. […]
Although automating service and shielding customers from the complexities of their offerings can promote adoption, these practices may also under-communicate the value of the services being delivered. If perceived value is diminished, then customers engaging with these shielded self-service channels may exhibit diminished willingness to pay, satisfaction, and loyalty.
The conclusion was simple: transparency of the effort involved in a process leads to stronger feelings of reciprocity and greater perceptions of value.
The study also found clear limits: for a dating site, a wait beyond 15 seconds led to diminishing returns, while for a travel meta-search engine, the optimal wait time was capped at 30 seconds.