Title: A Designer’s Guide to Perceived Performance
Context: It’s not how fast you are, it’s how fast your users think you are.
Synopsis: Einstein tells us that time is relative. Counterintuitively, the faster a body moves through space the slower time passes. Unless you are loading a webpage in which case time all but freezes to our insanely impatient perspective. I mean, 3 seconds to load a webpage? Who has this kind of time? I’m a busy person. I’ve got places to be. And sitting here in front of my computer screen waiting an interminable 3 seconds for your piano playing cat gif to load is not one of them I can assure you. And yet while time remains relative, we as designers are not without recourse for dealing with our restive end-user base. Without tearing the fabric of space-time asunder, we might still have a few tricks up our sleeve, for it is not time itself that is the enemy; it is the perception of time that drives users to distraction. And that—distraction—is just what we shall use against them to buy our user interfaces the additional perceived time that they need to maintain peace of mind for our users. Indeed, an idle mind is the devil’s stopwatch.
Best Bit: “A slow, beautiful site will always be less satisfying to use than an inelegant fast site.”
Leave a Reply