Usability Issues: Responsiveness

You take this new app which is told to be better than the one you use at the moment. If you’re lucky it’s intuitive and you don’t have any problems to set it up. Then you start working. And it hits you. Important operations are slow. Not dramatically slow, but significantly slower than with the old app.

Take new shiny Vista box with new shiny Office 2007 and sometimes it’ll freeze for a second. Annoying. Your good old XP with Office 2003 didn’t perform like that. Take Google Spreadsheet try to cut and paste a piece of cells. What the heck is happening? Am I faster than the app? Oh, yes I am. It wouldn’t happen with good old Excel.

The clue here is responsiveness. How fast application will answer to most often executed operations. Lightning fast? Maybe as fast as industry standard? Or you’re just too slow?

This is the big issue especially for web applications. Responsiveness of the web is significantly worse than desktop application. As far as we used WWW just to browse websites it was natural since it wasn’t a replacement for an existing application but a completely new one. With financial, CRM, project management or office apps we’re trying to replace desktop software we use every day. If they’re slower the user experience descriptions will definitely use the word “frustration.”

Focus on your software responsiveness, especially on the most important functionalities. Compare to other, legacy software in your market. If you’re significantly slower, well, that’s a sign you have a task to do: improve.

Whole usability issues series.