4 ms·

A spinner is not a complete response because the system is still going to respond more without additional input. Here is another quote that the paper quotes: "

A spinner is not a complete response because the system is still going to respond more without additional input. Here is another quote that the paper quotes: "...each second of system response degradation leads to a similar degradation added to the user's time for the following [command]. This phenomenon seems to be related to an individual's attention span. The traditional model of a person thinking after each system response appears to be inaccurate. Instead, people seem to have a sequence of actions in mind, contained in a short-term mental memory buffer. Increases in SRT [system response time] seem to disrupt the thought processes, and this may result in having to rethink the sequence of actions to be continued." A spinner still disrupts the thought process in the same way. I would personally say that yes, anything that takes longer (I'd say more like 100ms even, possibly less) is automatically bad. It might still be the best possible in a particular situation and pretending that something will necessarily be fast when it often isn't is also bad. It is easier to plan around tasks that take longer when a small and reliable set of tasks take longer and somewhat fits with the theme in that way, but I'd still say the core idea here is "everthing that happens should happen quickly" and have other guidelines to deal with the cases where that isn't possible. Don't try to trick yourself that the system is actually responding quickly when it really isn't. You could say that the most extreme reading of this principle would imply that a computer should never play video or audio. Personally, I would say it shouldn't except when I ask it to. My top guideline for websites would be something like "your website is not an experience". You can put an experience on your website and some people will appreciate it, but let me accomplish what I wanted to do when I visited your site quickly. Breaking my thought process to insert marketing is not a good experience. I disagree this is not relevent today; I didn't use a mainframe in 1982 but I wouldn't be surprised if the experience was more responsive than what is common today. Part of this is due to everything making network requests today but in general system response does not seem to be valued particularly highly. I regularly wait over two seconds for a particular text entry box in Windows 10 to work on a fast modern system with an SSD and no network connection that is interacting with a small local database. Windows 7 seemed more responsive to me, as did a lot of older software compared to modern versions.

dahart 6y ago
> A spinner is not a complete response because the system is still going to respond more without additional input. The paper talks about launching batch jobs. How does that fit into your interpretation of a "complete response"? What would the complete response to starting a batch job have been in 1982? > I didn't use a mainframe in 1982 but I wouldn't be surprised if the experience was more responsive than what is common today. I did use mainframe terminals in high school and college, and they were nowhere near the responsiveness that is common today. Not in the same ballpark, not even on the same planet. Our expectations for responsiveness have grown as fast as response times have shrunk, computing today is orders of magnitude more responsive across the board. > Don't try to trick yourself that the system is actually responding quickly when it really isn't. That sounds pretty catchy, but is completely subjective, it depends on what you mean by response, which is what we are trying to flesh out here. I'm trying to make the case that in the context of UI/UX best practices this is a red herring. The questions are about interaction and expectations, about acknowledging your input, not about whether computers can magically perform impossible feats of physics. Speed of light prevents some servers on earth from getting a response to you in under 100ms. I do tasks all the time that takes seconds or minutes, and I bet you do too. I disagree that long tasks are automatically bad UX. Bad UX is failing to notify you that you started a task, or failing to notify you that a task finished. Bad UX is giving no indication of how long a very long task will take. Bad UX does not automatically exist merely because a task takes time.
- joveian 6y ago
  "At NIH there was an average of 90 transactions and two batch submissions per work session. This did not vary, even though work session length varied with the computer response time." The paper is not talking about turning non-batch jobs into batch jobs (or batch jobs at all really), it is just an aside where they insert magic marketing numbers to sound good. Presumably for practical reasons they would consider the response "batch job started" to be the complete response. I think we can at least agree that it is unhelpful to call an unavoidably long task bad design just for being unavoidably long. Nothing in the paper suggests that making tasks avoidably long is ok if the system gives an indication it is doing something.

dahart 6y ago

> A spinner is not a complete response because the system is still going to respond more without additional input. The paper talks about launching batch jobs. How does that fit into your interpretation of a "complete response"? What would the complete response to starting a batch job have been in 1982? > I didn't use a mainframe in 1982 but I wouldn't be surprised if the experience was more responsive than what is common today. I did use mainframe terminals in high school and college, and they were nowhere near the responsiveness that is common today. Not in the same ballpark, not even on the same planet. Our expectations for responsiveness have grown as fast as response times have shrunk, computing today is orders of magnitude more responsive across the board. > Don't try to trick yourself that the system is actually responding quickly when it really isn't. That sounds pretty catchy, but is completely subjective, it depends on what you mean by response, which is what we are trying to flesh out here. I'm trying to make the case that in the context of UI/UX best practices this is a red herring. The questions are about interaction and expectations, about acknowledging your input, not about whether computers can magically perform impossible feats of physics. Speed of light prevents some servers on earth from getting a response to you in under 100ms. I do tasks all the time that takes seconds or minutes, and I bet you do too. I disagree that long tasks are automatically bad UX. Bad UX is failing to notify you that you started a task, or failing to notify you that a task finished. Bad UX is giving no indication of how long a very long task will take. Bad UX does not automatically exist merely because a task takes time.

joveian 6y ago
"At NIH there was an average of 90 transactions and two batch submissions per work session. This did not vary, even though work session length varied with the computer response time." The paper is not talking about turning non-batch jobs into batch jobs (or batch jobs at all really), it is just an aside where they insert magic marketing numbers to sound good. Presumably for practical reasons they would consider the response "batch job started" to be the complete response. I think we can at least agree that it is unhelpful to call an unavoidably long task bad design just for being unavoidably long. Nothing in the paper suggests that making tasks avoidably long is ok if the system gives an indication it is doing something.