The Curious Case of Countdown Timers

My dad showed me a weird “update” to the laundry app in his building. Instead of the countdown timer going all the way to zero, like it had been doing, it now switches to a “<5 minutes” message.

I thought perhaps this would be to allow some room for washers taking longer than the expected time for a couple of minutes because it certainly doesn’t make sense from a technical angle. I put it in a codepen.

See the Pen Untitled by Andrew O’Connor (@AndrewOnTheWeb) on CodePen.

If you open the CodePen up, the function basically checks to see if there are less than 5 minutes left. If so, switch to that <5 messaging. If not, just show the countdown. The behavior before the update was it would just countdown to 0. My guess is there was some behavior at the end of the countdown that would show “DONE”.

At best, the amount of code is roughly the same, at least in JavaScript, and instead of saying done, we see that “less than 5”. At worst, there is an additional if else for “less than 5” and then “done”. It’s a small thing that doesn’t matter much in the end but…it made the user experience worse and I just don’t get that.