Designing and Engineering Time

Posted by mkhairul - May 28, 2009 at 12:05:16 am - No Comments

Categories: Books, blog, rants

Found a new book through a blog post.

Designing and Engineering Time: The Psychology of Time Perception in Software

Few interesting points:

• Response time of typical action in the application should be about 2 seconds.
• If response time takes more than 5 seconds, it is required to show a progress indicator. User should know that system is working on the task.
• If system response time is more than 7 seconds, people tend to leave web site or switch to another task. It breaks interaction flow.

Another important point is how to make a noticeable performance improvement.

If you are going to improve performance, it should be faster by more than 20%. Otherwise most people will not see the difference (it was shown in some researches that performance difference is noticeable in a range between 10% and 18%). For example, if you are improving search function with 10 seconds response time, it is required to make response time at least 8 seconds (or less).

That blog post describes it in its context of making its software, for the public, I’m not sure how it fits in my situation but I’m sure it has its place when the time permits (very tight schedule).

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