response time - How can I distract / entertain people in an app while waiting?

We should do whatever we can to make our apps and websites as fast as possible, but there are some times when there is nothing that we can do to speed up some process, and so our customers just have to wait.

What are some best practices or ideas to improve the UX of this waiting time?

To clarify, I mean situations where:

• the waiting time in the order of 2-6 seconds


• there is no way of precaching or calculating the data ahead of time


• basically there is nothing that can be done to make things actually faster

Answer

There are many things you can do in such situation. Two obvious things that come to my mind:

1. 
   

   Provide some distracting animation (time goes faster when user is distracted, check the Foursquare's animation they've used in their iPhone app).

   
   


2. 
   

   Show some funny quote, interesting fact or tip that could be if not useful then just entertaining and appropriate in the context of your website content.