But Adar says it’s actually a useful, beneficial tool if deployed correctly-and that designers have been tricking their users for years, even if they preferred not to think of it that way.Ĭuriously, the case of the TurboTax animations is a departure from most of the deceptive practices Adar studied: Rather than covering up a system slowdown, it’s introducing one. The word “deception” has a negative connotation, and lying to users is generally frowned upon. “Their reaction was, ‘Wow, was that it?’ That was sort of a bummer for us.”īenevolent deceptions can hide uncertainty (like when Netflix automatically loads default recommendations if it doesn’t have the bandwidth to serve personalized ones), mask system hiccups to smooth out a user’s experience (like when a progress bar grows at a consistent rate, even if the process it’s visualizing is stuttering), or help people get used to a new form of technology (like the artificial static that Skype plays during quiet moments in a conversation to convince users the call hasn’t been dropped). Instead, the site’s artificial wait times are an example of what Eytan Adar, a professor of information and computer science at the University of Michigan, calls “benevolent deception.” In a paper he published in 2013 with a pair of Microsoft researchers, Adar described a wide range of design decisions that trick their users-but end up leaving them better off. It’s not because TurboTax delights in messing with its clients. (The same went for at least one other page which purported to show the progress of TurboTax’s checks for “every possible tax break” with three animated bars.)īut why? Why misrepresent how long it takes to complete a process, and take up unnecessary time doing so? It didn’t appear to be communicating with the site’s servers at all once it began playing-and every TurboTax user saw the same one, which always took the same amount of time to complete. We combed through the source code powering TurboTax’s website, and soon confirmed my suspicion: The animation was fixed. I sat down with my colleague Andrew McGill to figure out what was going on in the background. Did it really take that long to “look over every detail” of my returns, which is what the page said it was doing? Hadn’t TurboTax been checking my work as we went? Attractively animated progress bars filled up while I waited for TurboTax to double- and triple-check my returns.īut as I watched one particularly slick animation, which showed a virtual tax form lighting up line by line-yellow or green-I wondered if what I was seeing actually reflected the progress of a real task being tackled in the background. Throughout the process, the online tax-preparation program repeatedly reassured me that it had helped me identify every possible tax deduction I qualify for, and made sure I didn’t make any mistakes. They were a bit more complex than usual, so I set aside some time to click through TurboTax and make sure I got everything right.
In a fit of productivity, I did my taxes early this year.
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