Communicating latency
I recently toyed around with Wave.video the other day, in a vain effort to edit a video for a project.
Frustrated with their poor user experience, I promptly reminded myself that Canva offers their own video editing tools.
That’s where I discovered this fun animation—which shows up during the process of uploading media (images, videos) to your project.
I couldn’t help but notice the sharp contrast between this “affordance,” and the one used by Wave to indicate the status of videos being rendered. (Hint: it just shows a percentage.)
Of course, it’s not the animation itself that makes it effective. What makes it effective is that it’s a reliable indicator of the system status.
If it were constantly run for several minutes, it wouldn’t be effective. It would be annoying.
If it plummeted from 89% back to 62%, it would be frustrating.
Point is, you can’t merely communicate that the user is almost there. You have to take steps to ensure they’re actually waiting for something.
Otherwise, you’re just wasting their time.