Importance of Calculation Speed

Poor calculation speed impacts productivity and increases user errors.

Research studies show that a user’s productivity and ability to focus on the task deteriorate as response time lengthens.

• http://www.useit.com/papers/responsetime.html
• http://performance.netbeans.org/responsiveness/whatisresponsiveness.html
• http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/hig/2.0/diff-from-1.0/feedback-response-times.html
• http://www.vm.ibm.com/devpages/jelliott/evrrt.html

Users generally refuse to wait longer than 10 seconds.

Users tend to switch to other tasks.

User errors, and annoyance level, start to increase, particularly for repetitive tasks.

The user has difficulty in retaining a train of thought, but will probably not have switched to doing a different task whilst they are waiting.

You will probably need to switch to Manual Calculation Mode when entering data.

Improving calculation speed increases productivity.

For response times greater than a tenth of a send but still less than about 1 second, users can successfully keep a train of thought going, although they will notice the response time delay.

IBM studies from the 1970s and 1980s showed significant productivity gains for users when response times were less than a second.

For response times of less than about a tenth of a second, users feel that the system is responding instantaneously.