Week 5 Session: The Labour Illusion

Week 5. Showing the work as a substitute for doing it faster, and what that licenses.

15 March 2027

Weeks 3 and 4 were about how a wait is represented. This week the representation starts doing work of its own.

Buell and Norton ran five experiments on simulated travel and dating services and found people preferring the slower option when it showed its effort, with the results identical. Perceived effort produced reciprocity, and reciprocity produced value. Read the paper for the boundary conditions, which is where the interesting arguments are.

The second case this week is student sourced and you bring it. An interface that names each supplier as it queries them is the canonical shape, and once you have seen one you will find the others quickly.

In the workshop#

Each of you brings one interface that performs effort. We sort them into two piles: the ones where the effort shown is effort actually being spent, and the ones where it is not. The second pile is larger than people expect, and the argument about which pile a given case belongs in is the session.

But wait, there’s more#

Go and watch a flight search that lists carriers as it checks them. The list scrolls whether or not the queries run one at a time, and it keeps scrolling after the results are in. Time how long the feed runs against how long the page takes to become useful.