When watching an on-screen progress bar, I often comment to my client that we shouldn’t put too much stock into the information it presents. If it shows a “Time Remaining”, we may see that figure swell and shrink with little rhyme or reason. A Percentage-style progress bar may creep towards 30%, and suddenly surge from 60-99%. There’s often no sense to it all, and I’ve learned that there’s an accepted term for this sort of tech-theater: Benevolent Deception.
Benevolent deception is all around us, from our holiday traditions to elevator buttons to messages on websites and screens. Designers may craft their product, using white lies and cover-ups to manage human behavior. When done with the best of intentions and proper ethics, we might condone it and call it “benevolent”.
Turbotax does this on their website, with various animations. Early computers would show verbose file and pathnames as they booted, but these days, Microsoft and Apple cover over that glyphy porridge with their logos and other pleasant graphics. As you use computers and the internet, I’m sure you’ll notice other examples. Developers and engineers study us as we use their creations, and they may seek to solve our confusion or impatience or lack of confidence through “benevolent deception.” TL;DR — our computers lie to us to make us feel better.
Now that you know about this tactic, you may recognize it in more and more places (pre-recorded messages as you wait on hold) and even debate the limits of the word benevolent (are fake security cameras ethical?). But back to on-screen progress bars: such messages still have a purpose, even if you now trust them less. Let the simple movement of the graphic be your indication that something is still happening. And if that progress bar freezes in place (for too long)? That will be your clue that something is locked up or no longer working.