Designing and Engineering Time: The Psychology of Time Perception in Software

Chapter 10. Techniques

The techniques in this chapter fall into one of two general approaches that must be considered to improve the user experience of your product in terms of time and timing. The first approach is to make users feel that the actual duration of a process is shorter than it really is. This is called perception management. The second approach is to make users more tolerant of the duration. This approach is called tolerance management. This chapter describes both of these approaches that can be considered in the design of user interface (UI).

Perception Management

Generally, anything you can do to make users feel that the actual time taken to complete a process is shorter than it really is desirable. As mentioned in Chapter 4