Kayak's Progress Bar and Animations Changed the Way We Think About Waiting

Ryan Buell is a professor at the Harvard Business School. He says Kayak, an online travel search engine, couldn't avoid making its customers wait. Instead of a progress bar, Kayak designed an animation that showed what was happening behind the scenes. When we show people the work that's going on behind the scenes, it completely changes the way that we think about the wait in general," he says.