How can I improve the subjective speed of my application?

Question

Today my co-worker noticed that when adding a decimal place to a progress indicator leads to the impression that the program is running faster than without. (i.e. instead of 1,2,3... it shows 1, 1.2, 1.4, 1.6, ...) I checked it and I was surprised that I got the same impression even though I knew it was faked.

That makes me wonder: What other things are there to create the impression of a fast application?

Of course the best way is to actually make the application faster, but from an algorithmic point of view often there's not much you can do. Additionally I think making a user less frustrated is a good thing, even though it is more or less a psychologic trick.

Answer 1

This effect can be very dramatic: doing relatively large amounts of work to give users a correct and often updating status of progress can of course slow down the actual running time of the application (screen updates, progress display needed calculations, etc) while still giving the user the feeling it takes less time.

Some of the things you could do in GUIs:

• make sure your application remains responsive (resizing the forms remains possible, perhaps give a cancel button for the operation?) while background processing is occurring
• be very consistent in showing status messages/hourglass cursors throughout the application
• if you have something updating during an operation, make sure it updates often (like the almost ridiculous showing of filenames and registry keys during an install), or make sure there's an option to make it do this for users that like this behavior