The Labor Illusion

Krisztina Szerovay
UX Knowledge Base Sketch
5 min readSep 22, 2023

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The Labor Illusion — UX Knowledge Piece Sketch #53
The Labor Illusion — UX Knowledge Piece Sketch #53

The Labor Illusion

The Labor Illusion is a cognitive bias that might play an important role in designing your digital product or service: people have a tendency to associate more value to things that signal effort.

“When websites engage in operational transparency by signaling that they are exerting effort, people can actually prefer websites with longer waits to those that return instantaneous results — even when those results are identical” (Buell, Norton, 2011)

The 2 cases

I really like that growth.design calls it “labor perception” instead of “illusion”, since there are two different cases.

It can be real effort (in this case we talk about operational transparency — e.g. showing that the system is working hard to get those search results from our huge database), or it can be the case of artificial waiting, meaning that we deliberately add additional elements, steps (or waiting time) to match the users’ mental model better.

Visibility of the system status

It is closely related to one of the usability heuristics on Jakob Nielsen’s list.
If you want to achieve operational transparency (and signal effort), you should — instead of presenting a black box — clearly communicate what is happening or what has happened.

By doing this, you can

  • reassure users (‘things working as expected’)
  • build trust
  • provide the sense of control

So to put it simply, give the right feedback at the right time (my sketch about giving feedback).

How to apply the labor illusion?

Naturally, applying the labor perception or labor illusion bias depends on the use case or usage pattern, too. For instance, what if Figma added artificial delay to every step of your design work just to show how much effort it takes to display those rectangles?

Some general advice:

  • include additional steps or elements that communicate what is happening
  • add loaders to show that something is happening in the background
  • apply clear UX copy that e.g. explains the benefits, details the effort (e.g. “we are personalizing it for you”)
  • avoid using dark patterns, don’t manipulate your users!

The story of redesigning blogger

While this story is from 2004, its implications can be used today, too.
They conducted usability tests, and users were confused when the blog was ready in an instant. They added an additional step that indicated that the blog is being created, and as a result, users became satisfied with the process.

Changes over time

Of course it is important to keep in mind that mental models and user expectations can change over time (like it is described in the Kano model in connection with features). What looked unbelievable or felt unrealistic decades ago might seem like a natural or mundane process today (e.g. creating a new blog in seconds).

It also depends on the domain, on the product and on the target audience, so you should always conduct research.

Some examples

kayak.com’s big loading indicator showing that they’re doing their best to find good flights for you
In case of lusion.co, it is surely the case of operational transparency — but it’s surely worth the wait
Examples from various apps — there are 2 cases: “real work” (operational transparency) and deliberately added steps or waiting time (artificial waiting)

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Recommended reading & useful links

Ryan W. Buell, Michael I. Norton, (2011) The Labor Illusion: How Operational Transparency Increases Perceived Value. Management Science 57(9):1564–1579

http://www.cond.org/deception.pdf

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