Creating an illusion of speed
First off, loading bars lean on well-known tricks to make an application’s loading time feel faster than it really is. The best-known one shows the user a loading bar that fills faster and faster as it goes. Researcher Chris Harrison pushes the idea further still, measuring how long the loading actually feels for different kinds of progress bars.
See for yourself:
Ensuring continuity of the user experience
There’s nothing quite like setting out to do something and being interrupted. Because applications are built around screens that follow one after another, they can break the flow of the experience. A few tricks, though, can soften that sense of interruption and ease the user’s frustration. When designing an application, wireframes help lay out interfaces cleanly and make navigation smoother.
Use animated transitions
Animation makes transitions smoother and gives the user a sense of continuity. Jerky transitions, by contrast, feel like interruptions, like things being cut up and chopped into pieces, and every one of those moments is a chance to lose the user’s attention. A bit of animation does the opposite: it holds their attention and keeps the thread going. Go easy, though: overdo the animations and you end up with a site straight out of a 2000s PowerPoint.
Load content progressively
Facebook shows a placeholder while the news feed loads. It has the same shape as a real post, which sets up an expectation. That makes the switch to the real post feel smoother (and note, in passing, the same kind of visual trick at work in the loading bars), as long as what finally appears matches what was promised.
Avoid making the user wait when it is possible to free up the system
Sometimes an application freezes completely while a given action runs its course. That creates friction in the user’s journey. It’s far better to hand control back as soon as possible, so the user can get on with something else while the action finishes in the background (loading a database, sending a message, and so on). That’s what happens, for instance, when you send a text from your phone.
Obvious as this principle may sound, it sadly isn’t always applied.
Giving the user a sense of control
What’s more annoying than an application that takes forever to respond? In any interaction, timing matters enormously. The response time has to be short enough for the user to feel they made the action happen. As that lag grows, the user slowly loses the sense of being in control of the system, until they can no longer predict how it behaves. Running user tests lets you assess these aspects of the experience and gauge how usable the product really is.
A quick reminder of the time scales Jakob Nielsen laid out:
- 100 milliseconds: the cut-off below which the user feels the system responds instantly.
- 1 second: the point at which the user’s train of thought breaks. Past this, they notice the delay, and their sense of control starts to slip. Instead of feeling fully in charge of what they’re doing, they feel they’re getting it done through a system.
- 10 seconds: beyond this, the user can no longer stay focused on the task. They’ll juggle other things in the meantime, and so they’ll need the system to keep them posted.
Conclusion on user experience
To wrap up, our perception of time hangs on a whole host of factors we aren’t necessarily aware of. Technology isn’t the only answer on the table: we’ve shown you a range of solutions that lean mostly on the psychological side of interaction. The takeaway is that it pays to work with our perceptions to enrich the experiences we create. These approaches sit squarely within the principles of UX research, and can even feed into an eco-design practice by streamlining interfaces while keeping their footprint down.
References
- Zumbrunnen, A. (2015, August 26). The illusion of time [Blog post]. Retrieved from https://medium.com/swlh/the-illusion-of-time-8f321fa2f191 (opens in new window)
- Harrison, C., Yeo, Z., and Hudson, S. E. 2010. Faster Progress Bars: Manipulating Perceived Duration with Visual Augmentations. In Proceedings of the 28th Annual SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Atlanta, Georgia, April 10 - 15, 2010). CHI ‘10. ACM, New York, NY. 1545-1548.
- Nielsen, J (2009, October 5). Power of 10 : Time scales in User Experience [Blog post]. http://www.nngroup.com/articles/powers-of-10-time-scales-in-ux/
