Nobody likes to wait, online or offline. It was a study looking at shop queues conducted by Duke-Princeton psychologists that successfully recorded how people perceive the bad and the less-bad experiences of waiting. Their experiment was conducted back in 1995 — when the web was being born. But the test actually used a virtual queue animation — running on a desktop computer. It’s results are directly relevant to the experience of waiting for online content to load . Below I translate the study into what it means for user experience of the humble loading bar.

First up, the top 5 offenders in loading bar design:

Short

Short

Short vs long queues for the same waiting time mean progress is displayed slower and updates are less perceptible.

Perceptible progress in a queue is a key to a less negative experience of waiting.

Hidden Total Length

Hidden Total Length

It’s common to see theme parks design their queues through zig-zags and enclosures to hide their true waiting times — but people who commit to these queues cannot easily quit them.

The online alternative has no such guarantee. It deprives the user of crucial information on the total duration of the process and creates an experience of insecurity and doubt.

Low Granularity

Low Granularity

Every single instance of visible progress during an online waiting session produces an uptick of positive experience — so the loading bars that limit these to a small number of stages are unnecessarily capping this source of positive experience for the brain.

Constant Rate

Constant Rate of Progress

Monotony produces a negative brain response in most areas — and a monotonous rate of progress is no exception. An unchanging loading speed is better than one that slows down — but it is the not best experience of progress to offer, see below.

Double loaders

Double Trouble

This mixes a number of factors together. The loading of stages is achieved with low granularity in the top bar — while a fast moving bar shows each stage underneath. However, in practice, these sub-stages differ greatly in load times — and the true rate of progress becomes hard to see — and therefore hard for the brain to enjoy.

The brain’s favourite loading bar.

Long, granular …

Long containers are preferred over short ones for the greater illusion of loading speed they provide. Combine this with high granularity — right down to pixel level updates — and you have all but the best possible opportunity to produce positivity during the waiting period.

…and…

The secret weapon to give the whole experience an extra boost of positivity is to build in an accelerated rate of progress rate at the very end.

Best loader

In online queuing tests, this feature produced higher overall ratings of the waiting experience — even when it actually extended the waiting time.

- All animations show the same load duration.

Matthew Burton McFaul is a UX and game design freelancer from London. He has created over 100 online games for clients and is completing his latest work for the NHS.

Follow him on twitter @jambamatt

For client work, check his site faulton.com

From ‘THE EXPERIENCED UTILITY OF QUEUING: REAL-TIME AFFECT AND RETROSPECTIVE EVALUATIONS OF SIMULATED QUEUES Ziv Carmon, Duke University Daniel Kahneman, Princeton University 1995.