Illusions of Control
According to the statistics, 54% of people would not take pilotless flight, and 39% would never get a car ride accomplished by the autopilot system. The thing is that we love to keep control on our living. We want to rule life events and the world around us. We are still strongly influenced by an unconscious belief that we can affect the environment. This causes anxiety when we are not able to predetermine course of life, and rewards us when we have our being well in hand.
As users, we like to get an instant system response to all our actions. We are nervous when the system we interact with, whether it’s an app or a website, doesn't respond quickly. It is because we don't feel that we control it. In most cases, such issue can be easily fixed but very often, we face technical restrictions such as slow Internet, extensive data, computational complexity. The loading screen is the prime example, it gives us the illusion that it is informing us.
One of the most prolific examples is the Pull-to-Refresh animation. Anyone who owns a smartphone knows how this works, but they don't know it is a placebo because users expect the refresh to work but they have no control over how long a page would reload. So instead of doing nothing, we designers create this Pull-to-Refresh animation to reassure the users that the loading is now indeed undergoing and the page will show up in no time. From the user’s perspective, they have control but the reality is, that page will refresh when it's done no matter how hard the user pulls it, but the animation distracts the users away from the technical limitation of processing massive data flow in the backend.
We should give users interactive elements and do not limit them, even if it seems to be rational. That perceived feeling of control of the system will cause user’s satisfaction. They also will sense some degree of comfort even despite the fact they can’t influence the process.