User and Social Experience Design
An example of a real-world physical system where a deliberate delay could provide a better user experience.
Just a brief anecdote:
At work we have checkpoints just inside the building entrances where you swipe your proximity access card to get through the sliding pedestrian gates, known as “racers”.
For whatever reason, there’s a significant range of response times that you can experience between swiping your card and the gate sliding open. Now, from an engineers perspective that range of response times is probably not considered significant. At a guess I’d say anywhere from around 300ms to 1500ms.
But from the user’s perspective, from my perspective it is significant – because most of the time, you walk up to the racer, swipe your pass and walk through … without stopping.
If the racer is having a bad day then you go to walk through, realise the gate isn’t opening in time and have to pull up short, and if you’re moving too fast then you end up crashing into the racer.
I know you’re all going to jump on me and tell me to not be impatient – possibly a fair point – but I don’t believe it has anything to do with patience. I’ve learned that most of the time I can walk straight through, so that’s what I do – it’d be a bit silly to stop walking at the racer when it opens immediately.
I’ll tell you why it’s not about impatience, because I would much rather the response time be consistent than vary. I would rather it be fixed at a 2-second delay, that’s right, I would rather it be consistently a delay longer than the maximum variable delay I now experience … because it would be predictable. Because then I could walk up to the racer, swipe, pause 2 seconds, then walk.
Just goes to show that making a system as fast as possible doesn’t always provide the best user experience.
// purecaffeine.com is a user interaction and UX design, social media and Government 2.0 blog run by professional Canberra, Australia web user interaction designer Nathanael Boehm, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Australia License.
