Technology isn’t perfect. A lot of times it’s slow, annoyingly slow and equally annoying are impatient users. They quickly become distracted and press the back button or switch to some other task. Sometimes there are technical ways to make things faster, like reducing images on a page or reducing the number of items returned by a search. Other times it’s not enough to just reduce and that is when the principle of tricking people comes into play.

Remember that people are easily distracted and use it to your favor. Remember that first principle: Patterns and Prediction. To apply that here, predict when users expect instant results and manage them with distractions. If you know that something is going to take more than half a second to react, design a trick. This can be as simple as a unique click-state on a button, like a drop-down closing in stages or as complex as a mini-game to play while content loads in the background.