Users will navigate away from your website when it takes more than 4 seconds to load. This is a very bold statement that I read somewhere online not too long ago. Although I have little doubts that this is true in some countries, the user’s patience is highly affected by culture, age, demographics and the expectation of the user.
Although I would love to see and read a study that shows these statistics by demographic, an early study by Miller in 1968 gave basic advice on system response times, which are still the recommendation today:
Note that these recommended system response times have not changed in more than 45 years.
1 minute.
The most important time-frame any developer and UX designer should remember is 1 minute. A simple task can never take more than 1 minute to complete, or the user will use another system that can accomplish the same task within that time-frame. Note that we are not talking about the system response time now. A simple task can be considered something as simple as registering as a user or perhaps transferring funds from one bank account to another.
How about you? Is 1 minute too long or just right for you?
Mobile-Friendly Sign UpIt may seem like a small improvement, but displaying the right keyboard to a user can help ease friction on sign up, and make the whole process faster and more pleasant.
Taking Your Craft SeriouslyAlthough it is easily overlooked, being a software engineer comes with a great responsibility. According to Robert C Martin, a regular new car comes with 100 million lines of code, where he jokingly adds ‘written by a 22-year-old at 3 o’clock in the morning’. It scares him, and if you are tech savvy I am sure you share that opinion. Although funny – this is NOT a joke—being a software engineer does put you in situations where you write code at 3 in the morning for a piece of software that affect the lives or at least the livelihood of people.
Vertical Rhythm in Your CSSTypography and typesetting form the foundation by which your whole user interface stand on. For a designer, everything else—color, art direction—is relative to the intention of the product owner. It’s very malleable. The one thing that should be unbendable is the system by which the letters are laid out on the page. If it’s not solidly built, it can grow bloated and unwieldy. Small changes that would usually take less than an hour to apply, would take double—or even triple—the development time. The size of your file can also double than how it normally would be, and that’s not good for performance. On the other hand, if it’s not the code that doesn’t suffer, it’s the legibility that takes a hit. The vertical rhythm gets compromised in ways that can easily tire the eye of the user.
