Don't underestimate the value of simple eye-candy.

I once had a bunch of users complaining about the time it took an ETL process to run (it was about 3 minutes). After coming to the conclusion that the ETL process was pretty well optimized, I took the eye-candy approach.

So, I found a free animated gif of a puppy running around. I added a DIV tag and some java script (the package ran from a web page) and re-deployed.

The users were amazed at how much faster it ran and I received a lot of compliments.