
The Economic Value of Rapid Response Time (1982) - unsignedqword
http://jlelliotton.blogspot.com/p/the-economic-value-of-rapid-response.html
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dredmorbius
The response time here is terminal/UI response to user inputs, not, say, HFT,
though that might make for an interesting side discussion.

There's a related set of discussions on Jakob Nielsen's Site Formerly Known as
UseIT (now the vastly less memorable "nngroup.com"): "Response Times: The 3
Important Limits": [https://www.nngroup.com/articles/response-
times-3-important-...](https://www.nngroup.com/articles/response-
times-3-important-limits/)

TL;DR: the limits are 0.1s, 1s, and 10s.

Nielsen also notes that response can be too fast:
[https://www.nngroup.com/articles/too-fast-
ux/](https://www.nngroup.com/articles/too-fast-ux/)

A classic current example is of redrawn Web or application dialogs, in which
the element under a pointer (mouse, finger, stylus) changes _as the user is
attempting to click it_. An elegant solution I've seen suggested: that the UI
register the click _on the UI element which had occupied the spot 300ms PRIOR
to the click._

(Redrawn elements are a particular problem for visually, motor-control, or
cognitively disabled users -- the changes are too fast and confusing to keep
track of.)

Website response times: [https://www.nngroup.com/articles/website-response-
times/](https://www.nngroup.com/articles/website-response-times/)

Time scales in user experience: [https://www.nngroup.com/articles/powers-
of-10-time-scales-in...](https://www.nngroup.com/articles/powers-of-10-time-
scales-in-ux/)

From 0.1s to 100 years.

~~~
swiley
A far better solution would be to just not draw UI elements on top of each
other. I would like to point out that CLIs don't have this problem.

~~~
dredmorbius
CLIs generally aren't highly dynamic and offer only limited screen-
addressability. It's possible though for, say, a rapidly updating CLI list to
get away from you.

The other element, though, is that your selector point in a CLI is very
frequently (though not always) keyboard-driven, and tends to stay with the
item it's on, rather than drift up or down as elements are added or removed
_other than by direct user control_.

