QUESTION
I'm expanding on a question I posed in comments on How do you indicate progress to users in a multi-step form?.
Roland made the comment "because everybody wants to reach 100% percent" when discussing his reason for a progress bar in his wizard-style form. My question is this - has anyone done any research to see if this sort of thing actually helps? Or is it even possible that it could hurt conversion rates (Get through page one and see that you're only 5% complete - do you really want to go through another 19 pages?)?
ANSWER
I have found a study on this topic, quite long actually: Matzat Snijders vdHorst accepted version
And also have a Luke Wrobleski 'seminar' on this topic http://videos.visitmix.com/MIX09/C17F - and he has wrote about web form design as well
And one more on scribd Rethinking-The-Progress-Bar - "This paper explores the impact of various progress bar behaviors on user perception of process duration. The results are used to suggest several design considerations that can make progress bars appear faster and ultimately improve users’ computing experience."
From these resources, it seems to me that progress indicators improve conversion rates.
The question is in my opinion is that the how the different progress indicator design differ?
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