Rubber Indicator by Valentyn Khenkin

Since the beginning of the internet age, best practice has dictated that websites should be optimised to ensure they loaded and reacted as quickly as possible. Some famous design principals such as the ‘Three click rule’ were of this time. However, with improved technology and high speed broadband available to most, do interaction designers now find themselves trying to slow reaction times down?

Firstly, it’s critical not to downplay the importance of page load times. A study by Akamai and Forrester Research shows that almost half of users expect a site to load within two seconds, and they tend to abandon sites that haven't loaded within three seconds. It’s been proven that visitors to websites will explore less of the site if pages don't load quickly. And with more and more users accessing websites through mobile devices, it’s imperative that sites be optimised to load quickly on these devices also. In fact, it’s not just the user experience at risk, SEO is also a factor as Google and other search engines take page load times into consideration when ranking websites.

It is true to say that page loads times are possibly the single most important element of user experience, rapid reaction times are now considered a given by users. Back in 1993 (long before high speed broadband was available) Jakob Nielsen conducted a cognitive study and reported that there are three response time limits:

under 0.1 seconds gives the user a feeling of instantaneous response (the outcome feels like it was caused by the user, not the computer).

gives the user a feeling of response (the outcome feels like it was caused by the user, not the computer). under 1 second keeps the user’s flow of thought seamless (users sense a delay but know the computer is generating the outcome, they still feel in control of the overall experience).

keeps the user’s flow of thought (users sense a delay but know the computer is generating the outcome, they still feel in control of the overall experience). under 10 seconds generally keeps the user’s attention (though from 1 to 10 seconds users lose their thought process and wish response times were faster, it is advisable to show a progress bar to return control to the user). Over 10 seconds and you have lost their attention.

Like most timeless User Experience studies, Nielsen’s report was based on the psychology of the human mind, and it showcased the importance of quick load times to provide users with feelings of ownership, direct causation and removing the barriers to clear cognitive flow. Faster load times were seen as the method to achieve these desired outcomes.

However, our digital devices now often can move and react at speeds faster than the human mind can compute. And so more and more frequently we see micro-interactions being employed. These are designed to slow down the changes and help provide the user with contextual feedback of their action. Micro-interactions are visual representations which provide feedback to the user (hover over a link and the button grows in size, give a song a 4 star rating and the 4 stars individually turn gold and pop out, or click a menu icon and the navigation slides from the area where you just pressed, etc). These interactions provide the user with context, ownership and help them understand the cause and effect (i.e. that this page is now showing because the user clicked a link).

While Nielsen has indicated that changes at .1 seconds appear to the human mind as instant, Micro interactions tend to generally slow the change of state to somewhere between .2 to .5 of a second (often depending on the complexity of the micro-interaction).

These micro-interactions are now seen as essential to reduce cognitive load and remove distraction for the user. Where once we chased ever quicker reaction times now, by all accounts, we employ the opposite approach to achieve this outcome. Essentially, this is a lesson in ensuring you are chasing the correct goal. Had we continued to pose ‘ever quicker load times’, we most certainly would have missed out on micro-interactions. But by understanding the objective was to provide seamless user experiences that don't break the user’s thought flow, we found a solution that achieves, and potentially improves upon, this end goal.

Frontend are a UX consultancy based in sunny old Dublin, Ireland. For more information visit us at: www.frontend.com

Written by John Buckley