Passive Purgatory: When Waiting Feels Like Being Ignored

Wait a little longer

Every afternoon I pick up my daughter from the afterschool program where the pickup procedure requires levels of patience and humility that are probably good for me somehow. I’d like to explain this from my current perspective that has morphed from confusion and frustration to what insiders feel when they use the words initiation or hazing instead of abuse.

Before you start commiserating about long car lines, you should know the experience has nothing to do with traffic. Though parallel parking is necessary.

First, you walk up to a double set of locked glass doors with a stingy overhang that is noticeably insufficient in the rain. The locked doors and single button intercom remind you that you send your kid daily to a building designed with security measures to keep very real threats out. Waiting outside of those security barriers presents the disturbing thought that you, a parent, may be considered to belong to that threat. Pressing your face to the glass to get a peek at your happy, playful child feels like it is edging too close to suspicious behavior. So just to project overt threatlessness, you stand a few feet back and try to look trustworthy.

This is when the stand-off happens. It happens to the insiders who’ve been doing this a while. We all remember our early mistakes of ringing the buzzer. The buzzer gets you an exaggeratedly slow ambler who opens the door and glares at you over the bridge of her glasses. Smiles are for those who don’t buzz.

So you stand there, regardless of your urgency, and do not buzz. This is an act of faith and hope. Through the double doors, and beyond the vestibule, there are caretakers cleaning up the aftermath of art projects or assembling lines of rambunctious children. If you are patient, they will glance toward the door and see you waiting there with your eager desire get your children back home. When they notice you, they will not acknowledge this, but you must trust they have made the announcement, and your child is currently gathering her things.

If you are overwhelmed with doubt that anyone has seen you, I recommend making a quick lateral motion before you ever try the buzzer. Humans have neurological mechanisms to notice quick movements for self-preservation. If none of the caretakers are on their phones, this should help.

When you gain experience, this process will fly by in under 8 minutes. You will only use 1 or 2 of those early minutes thinking about how you wish you could just push the button or bang on the door. But then a wave of radical acceptance comes, and you feel proud of how much you’ve grown through this trial. Your child emerges, and you’re off to the next self-refining exercise of cringe containment when you ask about their day.

Try again

The pickup procedure reminds me a lot of how it feels to beg for acknowledgement from the automatic sinks at the airport. I think the sensors are like wild animals and can smell your fear. I always try to go in confidently, bolster my shoulders and appear bigger than I am. If the water doesn’t flow, I wave my hands wildly in ceremony to beseech the faucet. If the water still doesn’t flow, I seek blessing from another sink as another women easily activates the one I abandoned. I am weary and soapy-handed, staring at my reflection. Who am I? Do I exist? Am I a Shyamalanian plot twist exposed by this plumbing?

I would much prefer to trade the risk of germs for a faucet that predictably turns on and avoids existential angst. Is it just me?

Actually, this is the very common design problem of trade offs between predictability and convenience, control and security. When balancing these things, you can still keep your users from Passive Purgatory. If users must wait, it is critical not to ignore them or challenge them with character building without their consent.

Feedback and Overrides

For digital products, waiting even a second can feel like something’s wrong. In fact, the Doherty Threshold gives us only 400ms before we start to notice the lag. We’re looking for instant feedback.

A big part of the work to present instant feedback is to make the app fast. This comes from efficiently tuned data handling, clever prefetching and asynchronous loading, and caching schemes. But there will always be requests that can’t be optimized under the Doherty Threshold.

For the longer tasks, a simple acknowledgement goes a long way and avoids the awkward stand-off between waiting and trying again or giving up. Basic gestures, equivalent to eye contact and a nod, include things like spinners, progress bars, ephemeral messages, or even skeleton UIs which provide a familiar layout when the data is not yet available.

A step between basic acknowledgement and completing the request are courtesies such as expectation setting and periodic status updates. Waiting isn’t so agonizing if you have an estimate for how long you need to wait or if you can get a sense of the momentum of your progress.

And finally, to address a personal pet peeve, if a product offers a convenience feature, there should always be a long-form override. Don’t lock the main objective behind a handy, but temperamental shortcut. For the sink, water is the objective, no-hands operation is a convenience. Imagine if toilets didn’t have a flush button and relied totally on sensors.