What is UI Responsiveness
Definition
Quoted from Jacob Nielsen's Response Times: The Three
Important Limits
"The basic advice regarding response times has been about the same for almost thirty years [Miller 1968; Card et al. 1991]:
- 0.1 second is about the limit for having the user feel
that the system is reacting instantaneously, meaning that no special
feedback is necessary except to display the result.
- 1.0 second is about the limit for the user's flow of
thought to stay uninterrupted, even though the user will notice the
delay. Normally, no special feedback is necessary during delays of more
than 0.1 but less than 1.0 second, but the user does lose the feeling of
operating directly on the data.
- 10 seconds is about the limit for keeping the user's
attention focused on the dialogue. For longer delays, users will want to
perform other tasks while waiting for the computer to finish, so they
should be given feedback indicating when the computer expects to be
done. Feedback during the delay is especially important if the response
time is likely to be highly variable, since users will then not know what
to expect."
Application of UI responsiveness guidelines to Netbeans
As you can see in the Performance Test Specification the response times are applied as follows:
- 0.1 second - navigation and edit actions (e.g. folder expansion, paste in editor, navigation in editor), and painting of all menu bars must finish within this limit
- 1.0 second - all window and dialog openings must finish within this limit
- 10 seconds - all actions which are finished later than after 1 second and usually take less than 10 seconds must show some sort of busy indication (e.g. hour glass cursor or "please wait..." text); all actions taking longer than this limit are required to provide progress bar using Progress APIs
Features breaking the UI responsiveness guidelines will eventually end up with a PERFORMANCE issue filed against them (usually a P2), as specified in the Performance Bug Priority Guidelines.
