Design Theory | We Have Time Requirements
After reading Designing with Mind in Mind by Jeff Johnson, I chose to design a poster that perfectly illustrates and summarizes the design theory topic of Chapter 12 : We Have Time Requirements. Please see below.
CHAPTER SUMMARY
The theory that Chapter 12 discusses is that systems that don’t recognize with users time requirements are less effective tools and they are perceived as unresponsive. Another problem, is that perceived responsiveness, may seem less important than effectiveness, but really it is more important. For example, delayed feedback for button presses, hard to follow animations, and ignoring the user’s input.
Based on the study of the human brain, there are time requirements of human users of interactive systems that range from a duration of 1–150 milliseconds for the perceptual and cognitive brain functions that affect our perceptions of the system responsiveness.
To achieve a successful responsive system they offer additional guidelines.
- Use busy and progress indicators
- Have a delay that is less bothersome between unit tasks
- Display the most important information first
- Fake heavyweight computations during hand-eye coordination tasks
- Work ahead
- Progress user input, but not in the order it was received
- Monitor time compliance
- Provide timely feedback
Interaction designers and developers can create systems that meet human real-time deadlines, and that users therefore perceive as responsive, but history shows that faster processors will never solve the problem. In the future, systems will be designed to hold a heavier load on computers and as they grow more powerful, applications will be eating more power and demanding processing power, as well. So even with the progressive increase, responsiveness will always be a key issue.
POSTER DESIGN
For my poster design, I redesigned the painting of “The Scream” by Edvard Munch. I replaced the images of the two people in the background with Apple’s loading pinwheel icon. It is, by far, the most stressful delay interaction on your Mac when you are designing. For example, while tensions are already running high (especially when you have a deadline) and an Adobe program stops working and that loading screen appears… it makes you want to SCREAM!
CONCLUSION
I had fun recreating a classic art piece to make a point in that we have time requirements when designing an interaction application. I found the chapter interesting, considering that they gave great tips to achieve a successful responsive system that I can use in my future of UX|UI design.
