The 3 Response Time Limits in Interaction Design

Summary: User interfaces must be fast, or users will give up. (In the case of websites, they'll leave if pages download too slowly.) The exact maximum response times vary by usage circumstances, and should be either 0.1, 1.0, or 10 seconds.

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Response Times: The 3 Important Limits

There are 3 main time limits (which are determined by human perceptual abilities) to keep in mind when optimizing web and application performance.

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Jakob Nielsen, Ph.D., is a retired principal and co-founder (with Dr. Donald A. Norman) of the Nielsen Norman Group. Jakob established the "discount usability engineering" movement for fast and cheap improvements of user interfaces and invented the heuristic evaluation method.

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