The ‘Loading page’ phenomenon.
All of us use apps on our phones, tablets, laptops and other devices, the one common element in every application, no matter how different or unique it is, is the ‘please wait/loading’ sign
You see an animation sign that says ‘looking over every detail’ or something else. Let’s begin with understanding why companies and several applications use this technique.
Man has several innate insecurities , one of the main is ‘the act of being repeatedly reassured.’ Many components use this process on their websites and applications to mask ‘waiting periods’ but masking that is not enough, they put signs such as that to make the customer believe that in that period the application is understanding the information the customer has put in, without realizing that it is all deception.
Eytan Adar, a professor of information and technology at the University of Michigan calls this ‘benevolent deception.’ He wrote a paper in the year 2013 with some Microsoft researchers to find that companies create several designs to trick their users by reassuring them and gradually building trust for their app in the customer’s eyes.
Adar called this process ‘Benevolent deceptions’ since companies and applications aim to never leave the user in a space of ‘uncertainty.’ They deceive them to reassure them that it is all under control.
For example
1. Netflix automatically loads default recommendations if cannot serve personalized ones!
2. Artificial noise that skype produces to convince the users that their call is still going on.
Now you might ask, is this wrong?
Well, it really isn’t, every design in some form is deceptive because it is subjective to the user’s experience. These processes used by companies aren’t causing you any harm as such unless ‘the animation is fixed.’
Why is this dangerous?
If you are using an application for reports, taxes, plagiarism, paraphrasing, documents, or any important material, you are anyway going through some stress, anxiety and in that duration if in the app, you click submit and there is a loading sign that says, ‘looking over every detail.’ Although it might relieve you that it is checking through it, it is not, it is just an artificial design that is coded and placed in that location.
It is not fair to assume that every application does this, but the fact that we do not know which ones do, puts you in peril.
This process is also called ‘labor illusion’, a paper written by some Harvard professors in the year 2011 stated that websites that made their operations look too simple were less satisfying to the customers and that websites that had ‘longer waits’ and were less transparent were more satisfying to the users since there is an assumption that these sites ‘were actually working through the given information.’
