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0 pointsljm6y ago0 comments

I have to be careful about what I describe, but I don't think people care about speed or performance at all when it comes to tech, and it makes me sad. In fact, there are so many occasions where the optimisation is so good that the end user doesn't believe that anything happened. So you have to deliberately introduce delay because a computer has to feel like it thinks the same way you do.

At my current place of employment we have plenty of average requests hitting 5-10 seconds and longer, you've got N+1 queries against the network, rather than the DB. As long as it's within 15 or 30 seconds nobody cares, they probably blame their 4G signal for it (especially in the UK where our mobile infrastructure is notoriously spotty, and entirely absent even within the middle of London). But since I work on those systems I'm upset and disappointed that I'm working on APIs that can take tens of seconds to respond.

The analogy is also not great because MPG is an established metric for fuel efficiency in cars. The higher the MPG the better.

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TeMPOraL6y ago

> In fact, there are so many occasions where the optimisation is so good that the end user doesn't believe that anything happened. So you have to deliberately introduce delay because a computer has to feel like it thinks the same way you do.

I never liked this view. I can't think of a single legitimate use case that couldn't be solved better than by hiding your true capabilities, and thus wasting people's time.

> they probably blame their 4G signal for it

Sad thing is, enough companies thinking like this and the incentive to improve on 4G itself evaporates, because "almost nothing can work fast enough to make use of these optimizations anyway".

danenania6y ago

"I can't think of a single legitimate use case that couldn't be solved better than by hiding your true capabilities, and thus wasting people's time."

Consider a loading spinner with a line of copy that explains what's happening. Say it's for an action that can take anywhere from 20 milliseconds to several seconds, based on a combination of factors that are hard to predict beforehand. At the low end, showing the spinner will result in it flashing on the screen jarringly for just a frame. To the user it will appear as some kind of visual glitch since they won't have time to even make out what it is, much less read the copy.

In situations like this, it's often a good idea to introduce an artificial delay up to a floor that gives the user time to register what's happening and read the copy.

icebraining6y ago

Wouldn't it be better to delay the appearance of the spinner, so it doesn't show at all for those fast operations?

2 more replies

ratww6y ago

I see this argument coming up a lot, but this can be solved by better UX. Making things slow on purpose is just designers/developers being lazy.

Btw users feeling uneasy when something is "too fast" is an indictment of everything else being too damn slow. :D

anyfoo6y ago

Regions that use the metric system use liters per kilometer. "The less fuel needed for the same distance, the better."

wtetzner6y ago

I’m sure some sort of instantaneous indicator (e.g. a checkmark icon appearing) could be used instead of inserting artificial delays.

terminaljunkid6y ago

> In fact, there are so many occasions where the optimisation is so good that the end user doesn't believe that anything happened

IMO it can be attributed more to bad UI than optimizations.

thatfrenchguy6y ago

Everywhere but the US uses l/100km (which is a much better metric than MPG).

ljmOP6y ago

It's still used in the UK too, in our hybrid metric/imperial setup.

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