Laws of UX, 2nd Edition

Chapter 10. Doherty Threshold

Productivity soars when a computer and its users interact at a pace (<400 ms) that ensures that neither has to wait on the other.

Key Takeaways

• Provide system feedback within 400 ms in order to keep users’ attention and increase productivity.

• Use perceived performance to improve response time and reduce the perception of waiting.

• Animation is one way to visually engage people while loading or processing is happening in the background.

• Progress bars help make wait times tolerable, regardless of their accuracy.

• Purposefully adding a delay to a process can actually increase its perceived value and instill a sense of trust, even when the process itself actually takes much less time.

Overview

One of the features that is critical to good user experiences is performance. Emotions can quickly turn to frustration and leave a negative lasting impact when users who are trying to achieve a task are met with slow processing, lack of feedback, or excessive load times. Often overlooked as more a technical best practice, speed should be considered an essential design feature that is core to good user experiences. Whether it’s the amount of time the product or service takes to initially load, how fast it is to respond to interactions and provide feedback, or how quickly subsequent pages load, the speed at which a system responds is key to the overall ...