the time it takes a UI to respond to an action by the user and the effect this has on UX.
5
votes
2answers
114 views
Benefits and drawbacks of modal windows
I'm working on a web application and am a little stuck trying to figure out how I should implement signup forms, login forms, contact forms, and payment forms. I can implement all these in either:
...
80
votes
15answers
24k views
Is coffee a good excuse for a slow application start-up time?
I was dragged into a meeting with a client to consult on any usability issues as we watched a user performing day-to-day operations with a software application.
The first thing that happened was that ...
1
vote
3answers
126 views
OpenID login takes a second, how do I make it feel quicker?
Users on my site log in via OpenID. This is what loggin in looks like:
Click the login link in the header
Click one of 6 OpenID providers
(wait one second)
If they're there for the first time: Log ...
34
votes
16answers
1k views
How long should a page take to load?
Back in 1997 Jacob Nielsen was suggesting:
Currently, the minimum goal for response times should therefore be to get pages to users in no more than ten seconds
Obviously expectations have sped ...
26
votes
7answers
962 views
How patient are users at wait dialogs?
What is the length of time the average user will wait at a wait indicator (i.e. a spinning circle, beach-ball-of-death, egg-timer) before they think something has gone wrong?
If anybody can point to ...
8
votes
4answers
145 views
Amount of Time To Determine a User Has Stopped Typing
I have a filter form for a list. One of the fields is a text search field. When a user types in the field, I wait until the user has stopped typing for a half second (500 milliseconds), and then ...
13
votes
3answers
292 views
A single, long load - or multiple short loads, which would provide a better experience?
I have a very large, modular web application.
When it starts I can do things one of three ways:
A moderately long load time (about 60 seconds) to fetch all of the modules from the server (presented ...
7
votes
3answers
151 views
How slow can an app be to keep feeling responsive?
I'm creating an editor to write requirements and I want to give suggestions to the user about what to write. How fast do I've to present the suggestion so that it feels responsive to the user. ...
4
votes
2answers
181 views
Why do websites use “you are being redirected…” pages?
Frequently after logging in a website - specially old ones - I see the following:
Welcome! You are being redirected, please click here if your browser
does not redirect you.
And similar pages ...
4
votes
3answers
123 views
How fast does autocomplete need to be for a good user experience? [duplicate]
Has there been any study into how quickly autocomplete suggestions need to show up for a good user experience?
8
votes
8answers
434 views
What to display while waiting for a process (4-5 seconds) to complete?
We realized that in some cases the user may be waiting up to 4 or 5 seconds (depending on connection) for their form (or some action) to be processed. The form involves getting data from other servers ...
10
votes
6answers
508 views
If you can't improve loading time, is distracting the user a good technique?
On several implementations I've worked with, loading times can be as high as four seconds for the start page. When all reasonable options are done, is it possible to distract the user to make the ...
1
vote
0answers
67 views
Testing cross-platform touch performance [closed]
I am at a phase of a project where I need to establish a proper testing method where I can measure how well the touch performance on different smart devices (tablets and smartphones). My primary test ...
0
votes
3answers
128 views
Showing a loader for longer than required because it looks good?
Strange question this :)
Basically I have a website whereby lots of the loading/posting to a database is done with ajax.
At the moment there are no loading screens. As such if something breaks the ...
1
vote
4answers
175 views
How should I display a “please wait” animation?
I have to create a "please wait" page on our website. I would think you usually put the words "please wait" with some kind of spinning animation, but do I really need text?
Doesn't an hourglass or ...
6
votes
2answers
123 views
Activity response, startup times
I'm interested in what is a reasonable start up time or behavior for applications on smart phones.
This is simply when you click an icon on the launcher (as it may be called on Android) to the moment ...
6
votes
4answers
596 views
How long should the delay be before a tooltip pops up?
I'm working on web site in which a "ribbon" submenu pops up as soon as the mouse touches one of the main menu items. I'm trying to explain to the designer that it should wait until the cursor has ...
4
votes
1answer
118 views
UX in Optimisation and Simulation
As defined by IBM:
"[Optimization and Simulation products provide users with help
creating] the best possible plans, explore alternatives [and] understand
the trade-offs".
Based on the ...
5
votes
2answers
154 views
When to commit user data (a humble request from a systems guy…)
So, I am a systems programmer working on a UI (bad idea, maybe, but I think I do ok all things considered). Anyway, my program is an interface to a service running on a remote machine which controls ...
2
votes
3answers
456 views
Relationship between Front-End Dev and Interaction Design [closed]
[I am not changing the original question as there are valuable answers here. but the research I was conducting is now finished and results are published here
and http://hci.me.uk/jqueryperformance/
...
9
votes
5answers
610 views
UI Lag: What's considered “smooth”?
I'm building a drawing application that let's users annotate images and diagrams in a freehand style.
Not unlike a glorified MS Paint program, but there is heavy background processing going on.
...
1
vote
4answers
56 views
Terminology: View Help or View Documentation
What would be the right way to phrase a link in a complex dialog? The link provides information related to the exact meaning of the options and how to use these options. The choices are:
View ...
4
votes
1answer
142 views
UI Guidelines when delivering application over Citrix
I'm after some advice regarding some guidelines to consider when deploying applications over Citrix.
My company is going to be using Citrix in the near future. We have suppliers who deliver our ...
7
votes
2answers
183 views
Studies showing the impact of response time variability on user experience
Have there been any studies, or results, focusing on the impact of variability in latency of response times on the overall user experience?
I'm aware of the research on the "generally accepted" ...
13
votes
3answers
818 views
How to measure UI lag on computer?
Are there any tools available to help measure the UI lag of a given application running on a given computer?
There are plenty of guidelines out there as to how "fast" a UI ought to be, but how can I ...
1
vote
5answers
232 views
Speed vs Quality UI Pattern
I'm trying to come up with a good disposition of UI elements to help depict Function Speed vs Quality.
Can anyone point me in the right direction?
Are the Labels Right / Informative Enough?
Is the ...
5
votes
3answers
211 views
Managing an App's Loading Time Expectations
I was recently asked to come up with a framework to benchmark loading time expectations based on the tasks being performed in the app.
I found that there were three categories in which I could define ...
1
vote
2answers
109 views
Ideal file size for large backgrounds
Currently I'm developing a widget for a client, which has a step by step wizard style of filling using javascript. However, their widget for desktop would use 2 large backgrounds to fill up the entire ...
1
vote
1answer
175 views
What is an acceptable delay for the user when waiting for search results?
Is there any research that shows how long a user is willing to wait for search results to come back before they give up? I know Google has made searching instantaneous for people, but barring general ...
23
votes
4answers
6k views
What are the best practices for background images?
We are placing a large, non-repeated background image. It's very heavy; takes up almost 60% of the page load time. If you visit MSN or other high profile sites, they are using repeated background ...
14
votes
3answers
629 views
Is it bad design to hide a form's success message after a short time?
I was working on a non profit site www.gettingtoknowcancer.org and one of the requirements was to have a subscribe form on the right.So I created the subscribe form like this
which when clicked ...
1
vote
0answers
68 views
How to smoothly hide loading message and show the fetched data [closed]
How to smoothly hide loading message and show the fetched data.
I am using jquery to make an ajax call to get some data in meanwhile I am show user a loading gif, once the ajax call is successfull i ...
22
votes
2answers
442 views
Defining “Instantaneous” as part of usability acceptance criteria
The Setup
I have run into this problem time and time again. An interface is performing slow and QA and/or Engineering come back and ask, "can you please define the acceptance criteria for how fast ...
3
votes
6answers
414 views
How can I improve the perceived performance of a desktop application?
We've build quite a 'large' and regrettably slow windows application for various financial planning business steps.
I'm currently trying to improve the performance of the application by slowly ...
4
votes
1answer
148 views
How Should Tabbed Content be Loaded?
There are several approaches to loading content inside tabs. For example,
Load all content initially, then just manipulate the DOM to show/hide tabs
Load only the content of the active tab ...
4
votes
2answers
151 views
Showing “in progress” in a full AJAX application when we don't know where the new content will be placed
I am building a web application that is fully AJAX enabled. Clicking a link will load the page from the server and some tricky javascript will determine which parts of the page will require replacing. ...
1
vote
1answer
178 views
Loading Times / Breaking points
We all know that a user is not going to wait forever for a website to load. Given there are certain factors and circumstances that can apply to this, is there a breakdown of users stages/breaking ...
3
votes
2answers
127 views
Should options in a droplist be sorted by popularity or alphabetically?
I'm building a flexible search tool where the user can put together a query against one or many of a long list of fields to pull back a list of results. I was considering a TFS like query builder ...
8
votes
3answers
436 views
Does a “faster” loading indicator make website/software seem faster?
While checking how a site works on Internet Explorer, I noticed that the page loading indicator spins a lot faster than in other browsers. Also, the iPhone uses a noticeably slower activity indicator ...
8
votes
3answers
278 views
Load Fonts First or Last?
Fonts compete for available bandwidth and out of necessity have to be referenced as external files, rather than being inlined as can be done with essential CSS to avoid a FOUC (Flash of Unstyled ...
2
votes
2answers
125 views
Rate per hour vs overall budget?
This is the scenerio:
The customer fills a web form, requesting for basic information such as description of what he/she needs done, and the budget or rate per hour. This can be analyzed by testing ...
2
votes
1answer
137 views
What is the effect of a site that takes time to close?
Facebook, on my setup (OS X, Chrome) takes about a 1 second to close. I can imagine that there could be some stuff that has to be done, just before you close the browser, and that is taking up ...
6
votes
3answers
145 views
Showing the status of an action on a button
I have an application that can synchronize content between a website and a social network.
with a button you can turn on and off the synchronization.
the user needs to see the status (sync on or off) ...
21
votes
8answers
998 views
How can I distract / entertain people in an app while waiting?
We should do whatever we can to make our apps and websites as fast as possible, but there are some times when there is nothing that we can do to speed up some process, and so our customers just have ...
1
vote
1answer
106 views
Desktop GUI loading slow
I am developing desktop based GUI (single form) using wxPython and loads it using remote citrix access from client private network.
Suppose, the GUI has certain group of select and text boxes which ...
24
votes
10answers
882 views
Should aspects such as page render time or time taken to retrieve results be considered part of UX?
I was just reading this very interesting article on Fast Company about how How One Second delay Could Cost Amazon $1.6 Billion In Sales annually. To quote the article
Amazon's calculated that a ...
8
votes
4answers
267 views
How can I maintain usability on a slow system?
Obviously a huge part of a positive UX is a fast, responsive design. The software I work with (Electronic Medical Records) is sometimes used on sub-standard devices (e.g. ancient desktop PCs) or in ...
38
votes
7answers
2k views
Would intentionally slowing down UI help to increase sales on shopping sites?
I've noticed that iTunes store is always slow, at first I thought it's just because iTunes is a bloatware (which it is, on both Mac and Windows.) However I started to wonder whether this is ...
0
votes
5answers
329 views
Should app cache images or fetch them from server everytime in a mobile app?
I'm creating an Android app which is an on-device portal for installing applications.
I'm currently storing the required images (apps and category icons) in an Sqlite database using base64 encoding ...
4
votes
2answers
183 views
Empirical measures of performance
Other than time on task, error rates, memorability and use of help; what other empirical measures of performance can one measure an interface by?
Please expand your answers with real-world ...
