4 ms·
Speed is important. But what can be more important for the end user is the perception of speed. A decade or so ago I was looking into reporting tools. Crystal
by JustSomeNobody 7y ago
Speed is important. But what can be more important for the end user is the perception of speed.
A decade or so ago I was looking into reporting tools. Crystal Reports was getting expensive and I was looking for an alt. Some of them were faster at generating a several hundred page report but CR did something the rest didn't do. Instead of making me wait for the entire report to generate (several minutes) it would allow me to view the pages as they were generated. This meant I could read the first few pages while the rest were still in process. This made CR feel many times faster than the others.
- jakobegger 7y agoI think the important part is responsiveness. I once made an app with an export feature. It was pretty slow (I benchmarked it against other tools and my tool was an order of magnitude slower) But it was extremely responsive. The status bar updated frequently and was accurate, and a cancel button responded immediately. People in reviews wrote that my app has great performance! Nobody complained that an export would take a minute! I did not expect that. But then I realized that perception of speed / responsiveness is more important than actual speed. My app reacted instantly to user input, and never lagged, even while processing an export. I even wasted a lot of CPU cycles updating the UI to show status. But the result was an app that felt fast, and people really liked it.