Speed is the most important feature. If your application is slow, people won’t use it. I see this more with mainstream users than I do with power users. I think that power users sometimes have a bit of sympathetic eye to the challenges of building really fast web apps, and maybe they’re willing to live with it, but when I look at my wife and kids, they’re my mainstream view of the world. If something is slow, they’re just gone.
—
Fred Wilson offers “10 Golden Principles of Successful Web Apps”
Fred Wilson offers “10 Golden Principles of Successful Web Apps”
Jimmy Chan
on 27 Apr 10Solving problems is the most important.
Eoghan McCabe
on 27 Apr 10No one thing is “the most important”.
David Sommers
on 27 Apr 10The most important problem is no one… wait – no – that’s not it either.
Christoph
on 27 Apr 10Facebook took up to 8s to load (out of one of their developer videos). Facebook wouldn’t be there where they are if speed would be the most important feature.
Mark
on 28 Apr 10Experience trumps speed. Crap can speed by with the best of them. However, people will enthusiastically wait for the promise of a great experience.
Bill Leeper
on 28 Apr 10My former employer’s clients did not get this point at all. We had this really crappy feature that had performance times running in the minutes sometimes. We had made some improvements to it, but it was just a bad feature. However, when I would ask our sales force to discuss it with the clients they would be emphatic that it was the one feature the client insisted they had to have.
We did as much as we could with that feature, but it was dependent on resources outside of our control. I never understood why our clients didn’t get it. Maybe that’s why many of them went bankrupt (newspaper websites).
Jean-Pierre Bobbaers
on 28 Apr 10If that is important to 37s, why did you release your highrise iphone app?
It’s useless on a 3G
Nikola Miricic
on 28 Apr 10Speed is crucial. I would like that 37 signal’s apps are faster, too.
Basecamp was surely speedy application at the time it appeared, refreshing only parts of the page compared to whole page refresh of other websites. But now days web apps are faster, people are used to fast web app responses (eg. Gmail). What I am saying is that updates in your apps should without throbber, instant. Later you will have all the time before logout to send data to the server in the background.
NIkola Mircic
on 28 Apr 10@Jimmy Chan
Solving problem is not a feature of an application. It’s the core of an app. If it does not solve the problem no one will use it. But if it does, then features make the difference compared to similar apps.
EH
on 28 Apr 10It’s a wash: mainstream users may indeed be more speed sensitive, but with javascript hoo hah all over the place and antivirus checking every link clicked, the standard is already pretty low.
MIchael Troy
on 28 Apr 10”...but when I look at my wife and kids, they’re my mainstream view of the world. If something is slow, they’re just gone.”
So very true. This is often my gauge as well.
Tomasz Kowalczyk
on 28 Apr 10@Eoghan McCabe: Every thing is an important thing. ;]
Hari Rajagopal
on 28 Apr 10”…but when I look at my wife and kids, they’re my mainstream view of the world. If something is slow, they’re just gone.”
Does every app need to have such users?
Mar
on 29 Apr 10Haha speed is the most important? Who says so? Maybe 10 years earlier it was. Now noone who calls himself a programmer cares about speed, because he doesn’t even know what is an optimization (unless it is a functionality provided with a framework). Sorry, but that’s true, and there are no TRUE programmers nowadays.
PS: And by programmers I mean programmers, not application builders nor designers who think that knowing design patterns places them in the front.
In a nutshell: nowadays important is only the fact how fast do you deliver finished application and not how fast does it work. Pity.
Hugues Peeters
on 29 Apr 10Beforehand, I was fully on the same line as Fred Wilson about speed. For me “speed” was the most important user experience dimension. I always tried to make things simple and fast.
But today, I admit that my opinion has changed a bit after reading Steve McConnell’s Book, Code Complete. Here is his opinion about this topic:
“Sometimes users are interested in raw performance, but only when it affects their work. Users tend to be more interested in program throughput than raw performance. Delivering software on time, providing a clean user interface, and avoiding downtime are often more significant.”
“Here’s an illustration. I take at least 50 pictures a week on my digital camera. To upload the pictures to my computer, the software that came with the camera requires me to select each picture one by one, viewing them in a window that shows only six pictures at a time. Uploading 50 pictures is a tedious process that requires dozens of mouse clicks and lots of navigation through the six-picture window. After putting up with this for a few months, I bought a memory-card reader that plugs directly into my computer and that my computer thinks is a disk drive. Now I can use Windows Explorer to copy the pictures to my computer. What used to take dozens of mouse clicks and lots of waiting now requires about two mouse clicks, a Ctrl+A, and a drag and drop. I really don’t care whether the memory card reader transfers each file in half the time or twice the time as the other software, because my throughput is faster. Regardless of whether the memory card reader’s code is faster or slower, its performance is better.”
My personal conclusion is that things are not simple. First, we have to identify what “speed” is really for the end user. There is actually a difference between software speed, and perceived speed.
Secondly, for each application, there is an appropriate balance to find between speed and features. Removing a feature that is really necessary for end user because of speed problem is maybe not the good decision.
Lars Tong Strömberg
on 30 Apr 10That´s a classic “one man gallup”. I´m not saying speed is not important. It probably is, but hey, at least try to come up with proper research to prove it.
mrsleep
on 30 Apr 10This article was too slow, I’m just gone…
This discussion is closed.