Faster Progress Bars: Manipulating Perceived Duration With Visual Augmentations

Human perception of time is fluid, and can be manipulated in purposeful and productive ways. In this note, we propose and evaluate variations on two visual designs for progress bars that alter users' perception of time passing, and "appear" faster when in fact they are not. As a baseline, we use standard, solid-color progress bars, prevalent in many user interfaces. In a series of direct comparison tests, we are able to rank how these augmentations compare to one another. We then show that these designs yield statistically significantly shorter perceived durations than progress bars seen in many modern interfaces, including Mac OSX. Progress bars with animated ribbing that move backwards in a decelerating manner proved to have the strongest effect. In a final experiment, we measured the effect of this particular progress bar design and showed that it reduces the perceived duration among our participants by 11%.