the time it takes a UI to respond to an action by the user and the effect this has on UX.
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 ...
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 ...
78
votes
16answers
7k views
Is Google Instant good or bad UX?
For power users, it clearly saves time in some circumstances. It also jumps around alot and does things that are very different than before. One person said it is like a guy who finishes your ...
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 ...
20
votes
4answers
1k views
What is an acceptable response time for my ajax ui?
When I have to load new information from my web server via ajax after a user action, how fast should the information be displayed for the user in order to be a good working UI for the user?
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
21
votes
8answers
1k 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 ...
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 ...
20
votes
5answers
582 views
Will faster GUI always make one more efficient?
Are there any studies on whether one will actually get more done during a days work if delays went down i. e. from 10 ms to 5 ms for each update. My point is that if we are already working at the ...
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 ...
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 ...
