Dmitry has written a nice blog post about making wait times feel shorter. He explains why we need progress bars and loading indicators to soften the negative feeling of waiting. I wanted to add some further ideas to reduce the negative feeling.

Keep it interesting

Reading this article I remembered the Sim City 4 loading screen. Instead of telling the user what kind of data is being processed (Why would he care?) it presents some funny messages. Some other games display tips and hints during the loading process.

This can keep the loading process interesting, and I think it can be applied to many other applications than games as well.

As soon as possible

I have recognized another nice way of reducing the wait time in the windows vista start menu search bar. Instead of doing a full search and present all the results at once it displays all the items just as they have been found.

The user can already process these information while the rest is being generated. I think this is a very good way to reduce the negative feeling during loading times: Present some preliminary results to keep the user engaged.

Just a few thoughts i wanted to add to Dmitry’s post.

Do you have any other ideas you may want to add? Please share with me!

Regards,

Dennis