Every time you watch a little bar on your app move from “order placed” to “out for delivery,” you have Domino’s to thank.
In the mid-2000s, David Haubenstricker was in Domino’s IT department when the company was struggling after scrapping its famous 30-minute delivery guarantee, according to NPR’s Planet Money podcast. Customers were getting too anxious waiting for their pizzas to arrive without any way to know what was actually happening. So Haubenstricker’s team built the Domino’s Pizza Tracker, a real-time animation of a pizza’s journey from order to delivery. It debuted before the 2006 Super Bowl and became an instant sensation.
That idea has since spread everywhere. Design director Shuya Gong told NPR she now calls this pattern “the pizza tracker” with clients across all kinds of industries — Uber and repair shops all use some version. Researchers call the psychology behind it the “labor illusion,” seeing evidence of work in progress makes people trust and value the wait.
But it has a darker side too. Gong said she’s helped banks intentionally slow down trackers for transactions that actually happen instantly, because the real speed felt unsettling. TurboTax’s status animations reportedly run the same length regardless of what’s actually happening behind the scenes.