Anticipation and savouring
Waiting for something good can carry real pleasure, sometimes more than the thing itself.
Anticipation is consumption of a future event in advance. People will sometimes pay to delay a pleasant experience in order to extend the anticipating, and they will pay to bring an unpleasant one forward to end the dread. Savouring is the related act of deliberately attending to a good experience while it happens.
How it shows up in software
Products that create a gap between commitment and delivery can put something in that gap. Pre-orders, scheduled sends, food delivery tracking and release countdowns all trade on anticipation. The risk is that the gap is filled with anxiety instead, which happens whenever the person cannot tell whether the thing is still coming.
Using it well
- When a wait is unavoidable, give it content: what is happening now, what happens next, and when it ends.
- Let people schedule something good for later on purpose, such as a send time or a release date, rather than treating delay as pure cost.
- Design the arrival moment, not only the process. The first opening of a finished export or report is where anticipation pays out.
- Do not compress every wait to zero. A brief, clearly progressing wait before a generated result can read as care, while an instant result can read as a cached guess.
Where it turns manipulative
- Inserting an artificial delay with a fake progress animation to simulate effort that is not happening.
- Stretching anticipation past the point where it becomes anxiety, such as countdowns on things the person cannot act on.
- Selling access to a waiting list as a product in itself when there is nothing behind it.
Where you have seen it
Domino's
The order tracker names the current stage and the person handling it, turning dead wait into a narrated sequence.
Steam
Pre-purchased games pre-load and show a countdown to unlock, so the wait has a visible endpoint and no last-minute download.
Spotify
Wrapped is announced and teased before release, and arrives on a fixed annual date, which puts the anticipation on a schedule people learn.
What the research says
- Loewenstein, 1987Mixed evidence
Participants stated what they would pay for outcomes at different delays. For a pleasant outcome, willingness to pay peaked at a delay rather than at immediacy, and for an unpleasant one it rose with delay.
Hypothetical willingness-to-pay from a small sample, including the often-cited kiss-from-a-film-star item. The direction is well known; the magnitudes are not dependable.
- Nawijn, Marchand, Veenhoven and Vingerhoets, 2010Mixed evidence
Compared holidaymakers with non-holidaymakers in a Dutch sample. Pre-trip happiness was higher for those with a trip booked, while post-trip differences were mostly absent.
Observational and self-reported. People who book holidays differ from people who do not, so the pre-trip difference is not cleanly causal.
Grades are a judgement about the evidence, not about how useful the idea is. Plenty of contested effects are still worth knowing, as long as you do not cite them as settled.