Takeaway Points

  • Responsiveness and speed are extremely important properties of your products. Usability tests don’t always reveal these kinds of problems.

  • To be perceived as instant, actions should take less than 0.1s.

  • Actions taking more than a second should show some kind of indicator that the application is working. This indicator should appear where the user’s focus is.

  • Perceived speed is more important than actual speed. Sometimes, tricks can help you make your product feel faster.

  • It’s possible for things to happen too fast. In some cases, artificially limiting the speed of some features of your product can actually improve the user experience.

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