Time in the digital age

Designing digital experiences comes with an ingrained obsession. The obsession of speed and performance. Amazon calculated that an increased loading time of just one second could cost it $1.6 billion in sales each year. Google loses about 8 million searches (and ad displays) when page speed decreases by just four tenths of a second — scary shit!

So what do we do?

We create performance budgets, cut the mustard, run image optimizations, minify our JavaScript and CSS and cache our assets on servers located in the most exotic places around the globe.

There is a caveat though. First of all, faster doesn’t necessarily equate to better experience. Secondly, perception of time is highly subjective, or as Einstein aptly put:

“An hour sitting with a pretty girl on a park bench passes like a minute, but a minute sitting on a hot stove seems like an hour.”

Remember the last time you were on a bad date? Time suddenly runs painfully slow and the only thing you can think of is why you’re not sitting on your comfy couch back home, watching the latest episode of Game Of Thrones. There are many other, less hormone involved examples that come to mind.

When you stare at a watch, you can literally feel how time slows down. Sometimes it even feels like the watch is stopping for a second.

During holidays, time perception changes dramatically. The disproportionate amount of new impressions changes the way we feel about time. It’s why the first few days usually seem “slower” while days in a later stage fly by.

Time <> Interaction Design

Time is a crucial part of interaction design. At the end of the day, the absolute minutes and seconds users have to wait won’t really matter though. It’s about how people experience and remember them.

The case of Amazon sheds some light into it.

A study by UIE compared the perceived speed of web pages. They found that Amazon was rated faster with an average download time of 36 seconds than About.com with an average download time of 8 seconds. This is huge! They found more along the way…

When users accomplish what they set out to do on a site, they perceive that site to be fast.

How is this possible?

We do not encode time in absolute terms. It highly depends on an individual’s emotional state and context. When we feel pleasure and progress as a result of an activity, we barely notice time. The same applies to user interfaces. Well designed interfaces feel faster even though they might actually be slower.

Let’s see what kind of design strategies we can use to alter time perception and potentially create more fluid experiences.