Question

A delay will always occur between a user action and an application response.

It is well known that the lower the response delay, the greater the feeling of the application responding instantaneously. It is also commonly known that a delay of up to 100ms is generally not perceivable. But what about a delay of 110ms?

What is the shortest application response delay that can be perceived?

I’m interested in any solid evidence, general thoughts and opinions.

Answer 1

What I remember learning was that any latency of more than 1/10th of a second (100ms) for the appearance of letters after typing them begins to negatively impact productivity (you instinctively slow down, less sure you have typed correctly, for example), but that below that level of latency productivity is essentially flat.

Given that description, it’s possible that a latency of less than 100ms might be perceivable as not being instantaneous (for example, trained baseball umpires can probably resolve the order of two events even closer together than 100ms), but it is fast enough to be considered an immediate response for feedback, as far as effects on productivity. A latency of 100ms and greater is definitely perceivable, even if it’s still reasonably fast.

That’s for visual feedback that a specific input has been received. Then there’d be a standard of responsiveness in a requested operation. If you click on a form button, getting visual feedback of that click (eg. the button displays a ‘depressed’ look) within 100ms is still ideal, but after that you expect something else to happen. If nothing happens within a second or two, as others have said, you really wonder if it took the click or ignored it, thus the standard of displaying some sort of ‘working…’ indicator when an operation might take more than a second before showing a clear effect (eg. waiting for a new window to pop up).