Lag as a determinant of human performance in interactive systems
CHI '93 Proceedings of the INTERACT '93 and CHI '93 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
How machine delays change user strategies
ACM SIGCHI Bulletin
Integrating user-perceived quality into Web server design
Proceedings of the 9th international World Wide Web conference on Computer networks : the international journal of computer and telecommunications netowrking
System response time operator productivity, and job satisfaction
Communications of the ACM
Semantic prefetching objects of slower web site pages
Journal of Systems and Software
When the Wait Isnt So Bad: The Interacting Effects of Website Delay, Familiarity, and Breadth
Information Systems Research
Designing and Engineering Time: The Psychology of Time Perception in Software
Designing and Engineering Time: The Psychology of Time Perception in Software
Behavioral and emotional consequences of brief delays in human-computer interaction
International Journal of Human-Computer Studies
Interface feature prioritization for web services: Case of online flight reservations
Computers in Human Behavior
Problem solving of low data throughput on mobile devices by artefacts prebuffering
EURASIP Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking - Special issue on enabling Wireless Technologies for Green Pervasive Computing
International Journal of Communication Systems
40years of searching for the best computer system response time
Interacting with Computers
Detecting system failures from durations and binary cues
International Journal of Human-Computer Studies
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System delays considerably affect users' experience and performance. Research on the psychological effects of system delays has focused on delay length and variability. We introduce delay predictivity as a new factor profoundly affecting user performance. A system delay is predictive when its duration is informative about the nature of consecutive interaction events. We report an experiment (N=122) where short delays were differently distributed across two alternative target stimuli in a choice response task. We manipulated variability and predictivity of delays. For one group of participants the delays were of constant duration. For three other groups the delays were variable, but differed in predictivity. They were either non-predictive, probabilistically predictive (they predicted the targets with a probability of 0.8), or deterministically predictive. Performance with constant delays was superior to performance with variable non-predictive or with probabilistically predictive delays. Surprisingly, participants with deterministically predictive delays outperformed participants in all other groups. This has important implications for interface design, whenever there is some degree of freedom in scheduling system delays. Best performance is achieved with predictive delays, but only when deterministic predictivity can be achieved. Otherwise, constant delays are to be preferred over variable ones.