Users judge experiences against their expectations. Setting the right expectations — through loading states, onboarding copy, and visual design — determines whether the same objective experience feels good or bad.
In 2008, researchers at Stanford gave participants two identical wines. One was labelled $5. The other was labelled $45. Not only did people say the $45 wine tasted better -- their brain scans showed measurably higher activity in the regions associated with pleasure while they drank it. The wine was the same. The experience was not. The expectation changed the neurological reality of tasting it.
This is expectations bias: our prior beliefs about what something will be like leak into our actual experience of it, systematically distorting what we perceive. It is not self-deception exactly -- the brain genuinely processes things differently depending on what it is expecting. A hospital that looks clean and organised is perceived as more competent. A product wrapped in elegant packaging tastes better. A loading screen that shows progress feels faster than one that shows nothing. The underlying reality may be identical. The experienced reality is not.
For designers, this means every visual and verbal signal that precedes an experience is already shaping that experience. The font choice on your landing page is setting expectations before anyone has clicked a button. The copy in your onboarding is telling users what kind of product they are about to use. The animation on your loading screen is determining whether users feel patient or frustrated three seconds from now. All of this happens before the actual product is ever touched.
“Expectations are lenses. The same reality, viewed through different lenses, produces genuinely different experiences -- not just different reports of the same experience.”
— Baba Shiv, Stanford University, 2008
Both pages below take exactly 3 seconds to load. Click “Load page” on each and watch. The wait is identical. What changes is the expectation set during that wait -- and with it, how the wait is experienced.
The bad version shows a blank white screen. No signal of what is coming, no indication of progress, no sense that anything is happening. The good version shows a skeleton screen -- a ghost of the layout that is about to appear, with animated shimmer to signal activity. The wait is the same. One feels broken. The other feels fast.
The skeleton screen does not just look nicer. It does something psychologically specific: it tells users what to expect from the wait, and when the content arrives it confirms that expectation. The arrival feels like a resolution. The blank screen sets no expectation, so any wait feels indefinite -- and indefinite waits feel much longer than known ones, even when the actual duration is identical.
The first screen a user sees after signing up is the most powerful expectation-setting moment in the product lifecycle. Whatever it communicates -- about the product's personality, the complexity of setup, what kind of experience is coming -- becomes the lens through which the entire subsequent experience is judged.
Both onboarding screens below are for the same product. The bad version uses generic, corporate language that sets a low-energy, complicated expectation. The good version sets a specific, personal, confident expectation. The product has not changed. The experience the user arrives with has.
The good version does something specific: it names the time commitment (“4 minutes”), describes the shape of the experience (“three quick questions”), and reframes the user's role (“we build it for you”). Each of these is an expectation-setting statement. They prime the user to experience what follows as fast, easy, and collaborative -- which means even if something takes slightly longer than expected, the user has a positive expectation buffer to draw on.
The bad version says “configure” and “set up” -- words that feel like overhead, like obstacles before the reward. The user enters primed to experience effort. And because expectations shape experience, they often do.
Every touchpoint before the product experience is an expectation-setting opportunity: the landing page, the sign-up flow, the welcome email, the loading screen, the onboarding copy. What do these say about what the experience will feel like? Are they setting accurate expectations -- or mismatched ones that will create disappointment?
The most common mistake is over-promising visually and under-delivering experientially. A landing page that looks like a luxury product but has a rough, confusing interface produces a gap -- and a gap between expectation and reality always feels like the product's fault, even when the product is objectively fine. It is easier and more honest to match presentation to experience: let the product speak for itself, set expectations accurately, and focus on closing the gap by improving the experience rather than inflating the preview.
Shiv, B., Carmon, Z., & Ariely, D. (2005). Placebo effects of marketing actions. Journal of Marketing Research, 42(4), 383--393. Plassmann, H. et al. (2008). Marketing actions can modulate neural representations of experienced pleasantness. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 105(3), 1050--1054. Nielsen, J. (1994). Response times: The three important limits. Nielsen Norman Group.