Chapter 11. Violations

If it is possible to make time fly, it is also possible to make time crawl. Anything that causes actual durations to be perceived as longer than they really are or reduces user tolerance is a violation because it works against the optimal user experience. This chapter describes some of these violations and discusses some ways to prevent and correct them.

Perceptual Violations

Users do not typically carry a stopwatch to time every single interaction they make with the computer. Unless they are conducting tests, users are more likely to predict how long a particular interaction may take, approximately how long it has been running, or estimate how long some process took. The first types of violation are those that make users ...

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