Background: Stack Exchange now lets you paste images from the clipboard into the image upload dialog. Unfortunately, there is no indication that an upload is going on. I am wondering if this is really bad UX or it just affects me.
There are generally some functions in an app that take an unpredictable amount of time. Let's take an upload for example.
Is it OK to omit any indicator of the fact that the upload is indeed in progress? It doesn't matter if it shows how much the upload has proceeded, something like 
which says "Something is going on, please wait. There is no need to keep clicking that button." is fine as well. I'm comparing situations when you press a button and nothing happens until the upload (or whatever) is complete.
Is this a bad UX decision? Have there been any studies on this?
Answer
There's plenty of research about this. Much of it is in the area of perceived performance -- how long it feels like an action takes. Steve Seow has an excellent book titled Designing and Engineering Time: The Psychology of Time Perception in Software.
One of its major results is how we perceive response time:
- "instantaneous" (0.1 – 0.2 seconds)
- "immediate" (0.5 – 1 second)
- "longer" (2-5 seconds or more)
If an action is instantaneous or immediate, then you don't need to show a progress indicator. But if it's over 1s, then you should show a progress indicator. Determinate progress indicators are better than indeterminate progress indicators, but an indeterminate progress indicator is better than nothing. If a user has taken an action but there is nothing to indicate that the system is actually doing something, then the user loses trust in the system.
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