Andy Marshall, Head of User Experience

Designing for how we perceive, think, and talk about time

About time

In UX we sketch and wireframe moments in a journey, but we often neglect to think about what happens in between those moments.

Time is an often overlooked element in the design process.

In this presentation we’ll explore our perceptions of time, and some approaches and strategies when designing with time in mind.

Perception And Attention1

Perception And AttentionLet’s start with exploring what is within the realms of our perception and understanding.

The Pitch Drop Experiment In 1927 Thomas Parnell of Queensland University heated a substance called pitched, poured it into a glass jar, then left it to cool down. For three years.

Pitch is a viscoelastic polymer. So even though it looks motionless, it is in fact pouring through the glass jar, albeit very slowly - it drips about once every 12 - 15 years.

This may be an extreme example, but when things move this slowly we simply have no perception of change.

Watch The Pitch Drop Experiment live (only 14 years to go!):www.thetenthwatch.com

Let’s look at something with a shorter durationCan you spot the change happening in the following video?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nL5ulsWMYc

change blindness

Change blindness It’s not just change happening over 12 - 15 years we can’t perceive. Surprisingly we struggle to perceive changes happening over as little as 10 or 12 seconds, a phenomena known as Change Blindness.

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limits of attention

Limits of attention It’s often said your homepage should load within 8 seconds. There’s good reason for this - when interacting with websites our attention is typically limited at around 7 to 10 seconds.

As a result you should notify users every 10 seconds or so with more prolonged interactions.

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conversation

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Conversation speed In a typical conversation the to and fro varies from 2 - 5 seconds as two people exchange information.

Responses of less than 2 seconds lead to, “They answered that without thinking”, whilst those longer than 5 seconds lead to,“Why did they have to think about that so much?” or “They’re not paying attention to me”.

Too fast or too slow can create a sense of mistrust.

We’re incredibly comfortable interacting at between 2 - 5 seconds. As a general rule interactive systems should be designed to respond within this timeframe. The to and fro of information between a system and a user at this speed creates a natural, responsive, and trusting experience.

From seconds to millisecondsAt an even shorter duration, how quickly do we perceive things around us?

Let’s follow the journey of light from an object entering your eye, to your becoming aware of what you’re looking at.

The quickest route to perception

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Light bounces off a bottle and enters your eye. After 200ms electrical signals from the eye have reached the middle of your brain.

The quickest route to perception

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Another 200ms and the signal has reached the back of your brain where you’ve started processing vision.

The quickest route to perception

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Back to the middle then bottom of your brain where you decode shape, contrast, and edges.

The quickest route to perception

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Electrical signals pass to the front of the brain where we realise, “Oh, I see a bottle”.

The quickest route to perception Visual may be the quickest route to perception, but it still takes about half a second before you’re actually aware of what you’re looking at.

We think we operate in realtime, but in fact we’re constantly operating about a half a second behind realtime.

milliseconds

milliseconds

The quickest route to a response Some of our automatic responses are even quicker.

A loud, sudden, and unexpected noise can cause our spinal neurons to respond in just 50ms.

This is several hundred milliseconds before we’re consciously aware of the event that just happened.

Design interactions at the pace of conversation

Longer durations fall outside of perception and attention.

Short durations, too short to be perceived

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The problem areas for interaction design

Design Considerations2

Design ConsiderationsNow we’ve looked at some of the limitations of our perception and awareness, how should we design with these in mind?

Dealing with longer durations

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1. Any interaction which will take longer than 10 seconds deserves messaging- spinning wheels are not sufficient

2. The longer the duration, the less approximate we need to be with durations

3. When we talk in time, use numbers we are familiar with- 1, 2, 3, 5, 10, 15, 20, 30

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1. The speed of technology outstrips us but new technology is perceived as “too good to be true” and creates mistrust

2. Consider adding an artificial delay in your feedback loop to allow our slower, human brains to perceive change and interactions

3. Consider prolonged messaging, for instance showing the message “Document saved” for 5 seconds, even though the document may have actually saved in 40 milliseconds

Dealing with short durations

Performance Improvement3

Performance ImprovementIn UX we’re often asked to address timing issues, such as interactions that take too long, or through feedback that’s been received from customers about a painfully slow interaction.

From the service and retail industries there are three strategies we can adopt to tackle the challenge of improving the experience of time.

1. Make substantial changes to the way business is conducted- Operational Management

2. Provide a distraction, divert attention- Perceptual Management

3. Focus on making the customer more tolerant of inevitable waits or delays- Tolerance Management

Three strategies for improving performance

Operational ManagementOperational Management is about investing in a system, platform, or area of a business to help improve performance.

This should always be the first strategy to consider when looking to make a performance improvement, though cost can be a limiting factor.

The following are examples of Operational Management in action.

Operational ManagementThe introduction of the Blu-ray format in game consoles has led to the increase in file and data sizes of games, leading to longer and longer installation times.

To avoid gamers becoming more and more frustrated whilst waiting for a new game to install, Sony introduced a feature in the PlayStation 4 allowing gamers to begin playing the game as the remainder installs.

This feature is the result of an investment in the software and hardware of a system to reduce waiting times.

Operational Management

Fewer companies have analysed the psychology of queues and waiting more than Disney.

According to a New York Times article, if a popular ride like Pirates of The Caribbean is too slow, the Disney command centre gives the order to release more boats.

This shows an investment by Disney in having more facilities and staff on stand-by, which they can roll out, when required.

Operational Management

40 seconds

I once worked on a dashboard that reports on the health of devices across a global network.

A requirement was for the system to ping all devices on the network to retrieve a report on the health of each device.

Global networks can have many thousands of devices, so results would take about 40 seconds to appear on the dashboard.

An Operational Management approach to reducing this wait would require very high costs to replace expensive technology.

How much time saving is enough?Applying an Operational Management approach raises important questions such as, “What do we need to change to make the desired reduction in time?”, and“How much will the investment cost?”.

The question you should start with is: How much difference in time is perceivable?

Operational Management

“Just-noticeable difference” Weber’s 20% Rule

Weber’s ratio of 20% is a good rule of thumb to use.

We only perceive differences in time when they are increased or decreased by 20% or more.

Operational Management

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Here’s an example to illustrate.

Celebrity chef Jamie Oliver published “Jamie’s 30 Minute Meals”, later followed with “Jamie’s 15 Minute Meals”.

In time savings a 15 minute meal is half the time it takes to make a 30 minute meal, or 50% of the time, which far exceeds a 20% saving, and is therefore a perceivable difference accordingto Weber’s ratio.

Had Jamie Oliver published “Jamie’s 25 Minute Meals” it would have been a different story. A 16.6% saving would have been less than a 20% saving, and would have therefore been imperceivable.

Operational ManagementApplying Weber’s 20% Ratio to our dashboard with its 40 second wait, a 20% reduction in waiting would create a perceivable difference, so the desired wait would have to be 32 seconds or less to be considered a worthwhile investment.

Anything higher than this, for instance, 35 seconds, would be imperceivable, and therefore not a good investment.

Incidentally this works both ways. If introducing analytics increases the delay, providing this is within a 20% increase, it won’t have a perceivable difference on the experience.

40 seconds

1. Make substantial changes to the way business is conducted- Operational Management

2. Provide a distraction, divert attention- Perceptual Management

3. Focus on making the customer more tolerant of inevitable waits or delays- Tolerance Management

Three strategies for improving performance

Perceptual ManagementPerceptual Management is an approach that focusses on distractions and techniques to influence a customer’s perception of the passing of time and as you’ll see from the examples that follow this is a commonly used strategy.

Note that the more a customer is exposed to a distraction, the less effect it has on them so Perceptual Management should only be considered for less frequent interactions.

Perceptual ManagementThere are inevitable delays when eating out; from arriving at a restaurant and waiting for a table, to being seated and then waiting to order and receive your meal.

Visit an Honest Burger on a busy day without a reservation where delays can be up to as much as an hour, and they’ll add your details to their booking system, which will send you an alert when your table is ready.

This frees you up from staying in the restaurant to go shopping or have a drink nearby, distracting you from the experience of the wait for a table.

Perceptual ManagementWe touched on Disney’s approach to Operational Management, earlier, but they also employ Perceptual Management to overcome the challenge of waiting times in queues.

The sight of a long queue is demoralising, so every Disney ride has a serpentine queue that winds through a number of staged distractions.

Staff keep customers engaged up and down queues, and some experiences have more specific set pieces to distract waiting customers, such as the special effects waiting room for the Haunted Mansion.

Perceptual Management

One commonly used distraction is the use of televisions and radios in waiting rooms.

Visit a Post Office, and chances are you’ll find yourself watching a well positioned television, distracting you from the often long wait.

This technique has also made its way into healthcare, and televisions are now a common site in hospital and surgery waiting rooms.

Perceptual Management Stepping off a flight at an airport leads to an inevitable wait for your luggage to be taken from the plane and arrive into the building for you to collect.

Rather than have you step off the plane and stand for 8 - 10 as you wait for your luggage, many airports employ Perceptual Management through having you step off the plane then walk through a complex route of corridors within the airport to reach the luggage collection point.

It takes the same time to be reunited with your luggage, but the short walk distracts you from the experience of waiting for your luggage to arrive.

Perceptual Management

Waiting for content to load is all part of the experience when interacting with apps or websites.

The loading animations and spinning wheels found in apps and websites are examples of Perceptual Management.

These signify that activity is taking place, but they also occupy your time with distractions as content is loaded.

Perceptual Management

Another often used Perceptual Management technique is displaying messaging in apps and websites as your customer waits for content to load content.

Dedicating time to reading this type of messaging distracts you from the wait for the actual content to load.

Slack is shown here displaying messages as the desktop application starts up and loads content.

1. Make substantial changes to the way business is conducted- Operational Management

2. Provide a distraction, divert attention- Perceptual Management

3. Focus on making the customer more tolerant of inevitable waits or delays- Tolerance Management

Three strategies for improving performance

Tolerance ManagementTolerance Management doesn’t attempt to disguise the duration of waiting, but instead sets out to make customers more tolerant of the delay.

Tolerance for any duration is subjective and relative to the situation. For example, a 10 minute delay in travelling to an appointment you’re already 15 minutes late for is far more painful than a 10 minute delay following a 3 day wait for a parcel to be delivered.

Tolerance Management

Amazon offer next day delivery, and are very transparent about how they will compensate you if they fail to deliver to their promise.

Tolerance Management

During the installation of an operating system, communicating the ongoing process is crucial as users are typically unable to perform any tasks on the computer until the operating system has fully installed.

Tolerance Management Returning the dashboard example, Operational Management wasn’t a viable solution due to costs. Perceptual Management was also not viable due customers using the system multiple times throughout the day.

Tolerance Management was the recommended strategy in dealing with delays in waiting for reports to be retrieved.

Techniques implemented included messaging that reminded customers of the complexity of the task of pinging the many thousands of devices on their network, and multitasking was supported, allowing customers to perform other tasks as content was loaded.40 seconds

Key Takeaways4

1. We’re most comfortable with 2 - 5 second interactions 2. For interactions with durations above 10 seconds set expectations with clear messaging 3. Use numbers we’re most familiar with when describing longer durations 4. People can mistrust technology when it moves too quickly for them

- consider messaging or introducing artificial delays in your feedback loops 5. Use Operational Management when you can improve a system to improve

the experience of time, keeping in mind Weber’s 20% Ratio 6. For less frequent interactions, use Perceptual Management to manipulate

perceptions of time 7. Use Tolerance Management by setting expectations clearly, reminding customers

of the importance or complexity of a task, and support multitasking where possible.

Key takeaways when designing with time

Thank youandy.marshall@rufusleonard.com

rufusleonard.com

@andy__marshall