From Quora: What’s something that is common knowledge at your work place, but would be mind blowing to the rest of us?

The loading screens you see primarily on travel websites are artificial. Finding the cheapest flights, the best hotels, and whatever else you may be looking for takes less than a second. In fact, a lot of hard work goes into making all that information very easily accessible for the web app.

The loading screen exists because when the information is returned to the user as quickly as possible, he or she will often perceive it to be less valuable. It’s as if the server didn’t put much effort into really finding a great deal. No customer ever actually articulates that; but surveys, customer testing sessions, and most importantly conversion rates support the notion that when a seven or eight second loading screen tells the user that the numbers are being crunched just for this one query, the result is perceived to be more valuable.

In other words: an objectively better solution — the same results, but instantaneous — is panned as worse because of being human. And of course, the phenomenon isn’t universal. Google sinks untold amounts of money into surfacing the fastest results possible. In fact, they’ll even quote you precisely how long a results page took to draw up — often around 0.3 seconds or less.

Moral of the story: People are weird. But you have to build for people.