Designed for Use, 2nd Edition

Slowing Down

Slow products are annoying, but the opposite can also be true. Sometimes, things can be too fast. A typical example of this is scrolling. If your application scrolls too quickly, users overshoot their target. It often makes sense to artificially slow down your product so people can keep up with it.

A similar problem occurred to me when I was working on Appway, a business process management system. Its process editor includes a Save feature that allows users to manually save changes to a process. When people used the editor and wanted to save their changes, they often repeatedly clicked the Save button rather than just clicking once. Sometimes, they even complained that saving did not work properly.

It turned out that the application ...