After a user submits a life insurance application with us, we surface an intermediary page that we call the Carousel page. As a user is on this page, we are making a decision whether to offer that user a life insurance policy or not. The Carousel page is thus meant to be a place where users can wait and take a break from inputting information.
Prior to the redesign of the Carousel page, the time it would take to get a decision would take on average 10 to 20 seconds. Given the short decision time, the Carousel page was relatively basic with a simple animation.
Old Carousel page
A backend change, however, implemented by the underwriting team caused the decision time to increase by around 20 seconds. The problem was that users might feel like the system and page is broken due to now a 30-40 second wait time. This can consequently cause users to drop-off.
Shipped redesign
<aside> ⏳ Website response times matter and users can easily get impatient when a page loads slowly$^1$.
</aside>
Given the constraint of not being able to reduce the load time, I thought of a few ways to try to make the Carousel page as both functional and delightful as possible to reduce drop-off.
I explicitly pointed out in the copy the maximum amount of time it should take for a decision to load. This will at least give users a baseline idea of the amount of time it could take and reach out to customer support if the wait time exceeds it.