People genuinely love online queues

At 9:59 a lot of people are looking at the same page. It has one button on it, and the button is gray. At 10:00 it turns green and every one of them presses it.

Anyone who has bought a ticket to something popular knows what comes next. A small page appears. You are number 2,481. Please do not refresh.

I ran product teams at a ticketing platform in Dubai, and for a long time we treated that page as a bug with good manners. Nobody likes queuing. So we decided to get rid of it.

Killing the queue

The brief we gave ourselves was easy to say and miserable to do. When a big on-sale opens, everybody gets straight in, and the server bill stays exactly where it was.

It took months, and it was one of the most fun, most nerdy projects I have worked on.

The trick was to stop treating “buy a ticket” as one thing. It is really several, and only one of them is urgent. When you press the button, the system has to know, that very instant, whether the seat you picked is still free, and hold it, so that two people never pay for the same seat. That part we kept instant and always up to date, working from constantly refreshed snapshots of the hall.

Everything else can wait a few seconds without anybody noticing. Processing the payment, issuing the PDF ticket: all of that went into queues that run in the background and work through the pile at their own pace. The buyer never sees those queues. They see “you have a ticket.”

That is how you get rid of the waiting room without buying more servers. The expensive part was never the crowd. It was making the whole crowd do the slow things at the same moment.

The sale opens, you press the button, you have a ticket.

Nobody cheered

Buying a ticket to the show of the year now felt exactly like buying socks.

Nothing was wrong with it, which was the problem. An on-sale used to have a beginning, a middle and a small victory at the end. We had turned it into a transaction.

Ask people and they will tell you they hate waiting. In one survey of 1,200 people, about 69% linked waiting with negative emotions and fewer than 3% with excitement.¹ I believe the survey. I also believe what happens when you take the queue away, which is that people feel slightly robbed and cannot tell you why.

Try it. Same ticket, two doors.

What a queue says

A queue is information. It tells you that other people want this thing. Then it tells you that you got in and they did not.

Researchers have come at this from several sides. In a 1975 experiment, students rated cookies from a nearly empty jar as more desirable than the same cookies from a full one, and most desirable of all when the jar had emptied because other people kept taking them.² A 2010 paper found that whatever you are queuing for seems more valuable the more people are standing behind you.³ Wimbledon has understood this for a long time. It has handed out numbered queue cards since 2003, and the millionth went out in 2010.⁴

David Maister wrote the founding essay on waiting in 1985. One of his propositions reads differently once you sell tickets for a living: “The more valuable the service, the longer the customer will wait.”⁵ Now read it backwards. The longer the wait, the more valuable it must be.

Maister also left a formula. Satisfaction equals perception minus expectation, S = P − E. It means you can fix a wait without making it one second shorter, and an American airport once proved this in the most literal way available.

Occupied time feels shorter than unoccupied time. That is another of his propositions, and a seven-minute stare at an empty carousel is about as unoccupied as time gets.⁶

Putting it back

There is one more study I wish I had read before we started. Buell and Norton ran five experiments on travel and dating sites. One version of a site returned its results instantly. Another made people wait and showed them what it was doing in the meantime. People could prefer the slow one, with identical results. The authors called it the labor illusion.⁷

Our fast, invisible checkout was doing an enormous amount of work and showing none of it.

So we put the queue back. On purpose, this time. It is the same waiting room you know from every big ticket site, the number, the progress bar, the “please do not refresh,” and it is now switched on artificially. The system behind it does not need it at all. The waiting room is there because the moment needs it: a few seconds in which you watch your number fall, know there is a crowd behind you, and then arrive.

I would still do the project again. Before it, the queue was as long as the servers forced it to be. Now it is as long as we decide, and that is a design decision instead of an outage.

People genuinely love online queues. They will never tell you so. Do not ask them. Watch what they do at 10:00.