Understanding Users - Does Performance Trump Looks?

Question

It seems to me that whenever a GUI (Graphical User Interface) is involved, the look and feel of the interface nearly always trumps the performance of the application.

Is this a universal phenomenon?

Answer 1

Sufficiently bad looks trump any level of good performance.

Sufficiently bad performance trumps any level of good looks.

Answer 2

Although "you can't judge a book by its cover", people often do with software. I don't know if I would say this is "universal", but certainly common.

Answer 3

I don't think it's even a true phenomenon. I don't care how zippy the "look and feel" is, if it takes second to echo a keypress, the UI experience will suck. If it takes a long time to repaint the page for small changes, the UI will suck.

Now, as long as the response time of the application is less than some amount, then the look and feel will be a big part of the satisfaction.

Check out some of Jakob Neilsen's books on this.

Answer 4

The most important are price, functionality, compatibility, and reliability.

Looks and performance are both, relatively unimportant and in practice they are both therefore unable to "trump" anything:

• Compatibility: for example, in the real world I use MS Word, not because it's fast or pretty but because it's compatible with everyone else who uses it.

• Functionality: when I want to book a train in France, I use http://www.voyages-sncf.com/ not because it's fast or pretty (or even outstandingly reliable) but because it has the necessary functionality.

• Reliability: if an application crashes then I'm probably not going to use it again, no matter how fast it crashes, or how nice it looked before it crashed.

• Price: etc. (say no more).

Answer 5

I've found that the best combination is a snappy and easy-to-use GUI. This doesn't necessarily mean your app has to have great performance, but having the GUI freeze on you is a kiss of death. The iPhone's Safari does this well--you can continue to scroll around the screen even if the rendering engine can't keep up with you. Yeah, the no-content hatch marks are ugly, but at least the user knows he's in control.

Answer 6

Isn't it a bit of a false dichotomy? If the look and feel of an application isn't clean, well-organized and effective then you don't have a high-performing application. No matter how fast it may be.

Answer 7

This boils down to the psychology of your target audience and about the architecture of your application. If the GUI reacts quickly and is laid out in such a way that it is intuitive to the user (as opposed to the developer), then the underlying layers may not need to perform so well. If however, the user wants to get data from a database and they're left hanging while the data loads, they're going to feel very differently. Compare 2 web applications just as an example:

• Application one feels quite responsive but under the covers things take longer than it appears on the surface - it uses AJAX to talk to Web Services. The Web Services aren't the quickest, but everything happens on callback (asynchronously), so the user isn't held up while fields populate. It doesn't impede their workflow. On a bad day when network performance deteriorates the background performance, sure it's noticeable, but user activity isn't impeded any further than normal.

• Application two doesn't feel quite so responsive. Everything happens on postback, there's no AJAX or Web Services, on a good day the page loads are fairly quick. Of course, on every postback the user's workflow is impeded while they wait for the page to reload. On a bad day, network performance causes performance to deteriorate noticeably, further impeding the user.

Application one is far less likely to get complaints because the user isn't held up even though fields aren't loaded so quickly. The user can enter data and move on. Everything is handled asynchronously. Of course, in the background, the Web Service process may actually be slower than the full page refresh but the user isn't going to care so much.

From many thousands of hours writing software and directly interacting with my users - frequently those who aren't necessarily as computer literate as your average 10 year old I've noted these points that are key to getting acceptance from just such an audience [written from a user perspective]:

1. It must do what I want how I want it: Don't just read the spec and expect your code to meet exactly what it says on the paper. Really read what it says on the paper and understand what the user meant by that. Design to the underlying meaning of the words not the black and white of the ink on the paper. If you don't understand exactly what I meant, come and talk to me and I'll explain it until you do. I'll be less happy if you deliver software that missed my whole point than I will by your questions. I'll feel much happier if I get the feeling you're on my side by really trying to understand me.

2. It must assist my workflow and not impede it: It's great if all I have to do is push one button to complete what would've taken me an hour to do before, but if it freezes my computer for the 20 minutes it takes to complete the task, I'm not going to be a happy camper.

3. It must be intuitive to use: That means I don't want to have to wade through the documentation you didn't provide me with in order to figure out how to use it. Neither do I want a 20 minute explanation that I'm going to forget 3 minutes after you walk out of the door. Design the software such that my 10 year old could figure it out as easily as they can program the PVR. It means that I should interact with it in a manner that seems logical to me as the person that will be using it day in day out. It doesn't matter if it's functionally correct, if I can't figure out how to use it, I'm not going to use it, much less pay for it.

4. It must be responsive: I don't want to have to click a button and then wait 10 seconds for a list to load and then select an item from that list and then wait for another screen to load before I can select an action to complete on that item which then takes 5 minutes to complete. Find a way to load the data quickly - if you can't load the data quickly in response to my action, then figure out a trick to make it feel like the data is loading quickly - perhaps by loading it in advance in the background and only displaying what I need displayed in response to my action... my point is, I don't care what you do, just make it appear like it's doing it quickly.

5. It must be robust: It doesn't matter what I throw at it, it should accept it and move on. If I do something wrong or put something incorrect in a field, tell me - IN PLAIN ENGLISH!! I don't care about buffer overflows or IOExceptions thrown at line 479 while attempting to open a file. Just handle it and tell me what I did wrong in language I understand.

6. Give me documentation: Okay, I know I'm not going to read it, and I'm more likely to pick the phone up and call you than remember where I put it when you gave it to me. But knowing its there makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside. It shows that you cared about the software enough - and me enough to write instructions that I can reference oustide business hours when you're not available.

7. Price: This depends entirely on your audience, but in my experience, if you met all of the above points, price tends to be far less of a concern than it might appear on the surface.

Answer 8

I think it depends on the users. I work in a medium sized company in the IT department constructing web based software for consumption by the employees of said company. The users range from Human Resources, Manufacturing, R&D, Sales, Finance, to making applications for the CEO. Each of the different departments and users within those departments seem to have different criteria for what makes a quality application.

For instance, a Human Resource department usually deals with a lot of textual data. They spend heaps of time inputting things into forms like employee information, entitlements, recruiting etc. These types of users might opt for the look and feel of an application for this purpose, they want an aesthetically pleasing design that is easy to navigate and intuitive.

On the other hand a department like finance might favor performance in their reporting tools. I have had a few experiences with large SQL tables with complicated queries that took a considerable amount of time to execute. Users that run these kinds of reports many times a day soon get fed up of waiting and would gladly lose a bit of interface intuitiveness in exchange for time that could be spent on other tasks.

So, i would say that you can't make a blanket statement like "All users prefer a speedy application" or "All users like pretty applications". It really depends on the users preferences, their job requirements, and the applications purpose.

Answer 9

Balance is everything.

The UI needs to look respectable, professional and flow similar to other applications so the user has a common experience, thus little learning curve. It shouldn't have unecesssary whistles and bells unless specifically requested.

The performance should be at least tolerable. If you have extra time in a project, I would spend that time speeding it up unless the user specifically asks for UI enhancements. Many times, whistles and bells can compromise performance as some UI enhancements require additional CPU time AND sometimes add awkwardness to the app. At first glance, some of these apps look cool but long term usability suffers in favor of the NEATO factor.

Answer 10

Important for the user is that using the program is fun. The program should not only be able to do what I want it must feel good to use the program. Making the user wait at moments the user does not understand or foresee isn't fun. Crashing and making errors isn't fun either.
But looking good and helping me doing my task through the look and let me work fast and without work flow interruptions is fun.

Programmers often think that programs that are slow and use much memory are bad and they measure all their software on memory usage and the use of the processor. But most of you users won't start top or the windows task manager and look at the footprint of your program they will use it and if if feels good to use the program, and the rest of their computer with the program running they will fell good to.

One thing I read about often is the usage of as many CPUs as possible to get a task for the user done in the shortest time. Is this high performance? Your program is very fast. But the Computer is very slow at the moment and switching to the email program because I know the task will take its time is a pain in the ass. So sometimes you may want to free some resources to improve the feeling of your program. Even if that would slow down your own program.