Transcript

Time is the most valuable thing we can get, and it, therefore, plays a significant role in the users' perception of a solution and the experience he or she has. I'm your host, Chris, and this is the UX Globals Podcast!

Intro

Chris

The user experience a person has when using a product, software, or service highly depends on multiple time factors. The first and most important one is the boot or starting time. How long does it take until a solution has started? It can apply to a product like a smartphone, computer, drone, room lamp or a software for picture editing, playing music, messaging others. The moment users have to wait for more than one second, you might lose them before even getting them. No one likes losing time so why should anyone use our solution if it feels like it slows down the process? Even if our solution is faster than current solutions and users only perceive it as slower - it still makes our solution less interesting to them.

Therefore the starting time of a software, product, or service need to be as fast as somehow possible! Furthermore, loading times of new data needs to be very quick. Of course, we can always blame our users' internet connection from time to time, but we have to take every step we can make to speed up loading times. On a website, for example, we can use techniques like gzip, modern image formats, or asynchronous loading to improve our web page's performance.

What we, as UX designers, can influence the most are interaction times. Many designers still believe that the amount of clicks shows how good the usability and user experience of a solution is. I can guarantee you: They are wrong. Which solution would you rather use? The one where you need to do one click, and it takes you 15 seconds to come to the desired result or the one you need to click two times, and it takes you only seven seconds to get to the desired result?

Of course, I can not tell you which one you have to prefer, but based on my experiences from user tests, I know that time is more valuable to most users than the reduction of interaction steps. Therefore most people will chose the option where we need to click twice to get to our result faster.

The very simple reason for this is that we can not get our time back. Every second we have matters, and once it is over, we have no chance of getting it back, and therefore the performance of the solutions we create must be astonishing! Nothing can be more frustrating than interacting with the system and not getting a response because it has to do its calculations first.

Therefore every proper innovative solution makes its users save time in some way! Join the UX Globals Community on Facebook, and remember to always keep pushing! Have a good one!