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0 pointshburd6y ago0 comments

> These days, I think most users will lose more time and be more frustrated by poor UI design, accidental inputs, etc. than any performance characteristics of the software they use.

I’m willing to bet that a significant percentage of my accidental inputs are due to UI latency.

0 comments

bhauer6y ago

Virtually all of my accidental inputs are caused by application slowness or repaints that occur several hundred milliseconds after they should have.

I want all interactions with all of my computing devices to occur in as close to 0ms as possible. 0ms is great; 20ms is good; 200ms is bad; 500ms is absolutely inexcusable unless you're doing significant computation. I find it astonishing how many things will run in the 200-500ms range for utterly trivial operations such as just navigating between UI elements. And no, animation is not an acceptable illusion to hide slowness.

I am with the OP. "Good enough" is a bane on our discipline.

prox6y ago

How about the i-am-about-to-press-this-button-but-wait-we-need-to-rerender-the-whole-page. At which point you misclick or not at all. Especially some recent shops and ad heavy pages use this great functionality ;)

Natanael_L6y ago

Twitter on mobile.....

SAI_Peregrinus6y ago

The rule for games is that you have 16ms (for a 60Hz monitor) to process all input and draw the next frame. That's a decent rule for everything related to user input. And since there are high refresh-rate monitors, and it's a web app and not a game using 100% CPU & GPU, just assume 4-5ms for a nicer number. If you take longer than that to respond to user input on your lowest-capability supported configuration, you've got a bug.

0ms is great, 4ms is very good, 16ms is minimally acceptable, 20ms needs improvement (you're skipping frames), 200ms is bad (it's visible!), 500ms is ridiculous and should have been showing a progress bar or something.

Responding to input doesn't necessarily mean being done with processing, it just means showing a response.

0x4454426y ago

This happens to me all the time starting pipelines in Gitlab. Which typically results in unwanted merges to master which then need to be reverted.

eecc6y ago

Don’t get me started with all the impressive rotating zooming in Google Maps every time you accidentally brush the screen.

The usage story requires you to switch to turn-by-turn, and there’s no way to have bird eye map following your location along route (unless you just choose some zoom level and manually recenter every so often.)

It’s awful, distracting and frankly a waste of time... just to show a bit of animation every time I accidentally fail to register a drag...

Damn Ui

TeMPOraL6y ago

Well, Google Maps is its own story - it's like the app is being actively designed to be as useless as possible as a map - a means to navigate. The only supported workflow is search + turn-by-turn navigation, and everything else seems to be disincentivized on purpose.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse