Perhaps this is no longer as much of a problem as it used to be. At one time, people would plan "interactive" applications where the response time turned out t

Perhaps this is no longer as much of a problem as it used to be. At one time, people would plan "interactive" applications where the response time turned out to be >10X or more than what they had anticipated. As an example, imagine clicking on a dropbox and having to wait 20sec for choices to appear -- and then also finding scrolling down a list impossibly slow. That would call for reconsidering the approach to presenting choices, in this case, and in general it could call for a significant redesign in advance. EDIT: I suppose this could still be most obvious in games. Could you successfully plan a visual game design while being 10X miscalibrated in how fast an engine will support updates?