Designing Latency
Our inaugural post discusses a concept that I find incredibly fascinating: latency. Latency—simply stated as the delay between action and response or cause and effect—creates all manner of challenges and opportunities for designers of digital and physical experiences. This article highlights one familiar organization's efforts to reduce the negative perception of latency without taking on the more complex task of fixing the root cause.
Enjoy.
–Stratton Cherouny
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It’s hard to overestimate the value of easy (think Amazon). It’s equally hard, perhaps even more so in an increasingly mobile-first world, to overestimate the value of fast. Few know this better than Instagram, which rapidly built its following in part because of the ease and speed with which its users could snap, edit and share pics through the mobile app.
Users felt this value with every tap and swipe. However, it wasn’t until I came across this 2012 presentation by Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger that I realized just how much of that feeling of fast was intentionally built into the design of the experience. In it, he describes three principles of mobile design employed by Instagram at the time to create optimal user experiences:
- Perform actions optimistically
- Adaptively pre-load content
- Move bits when no one’s watching
Number one is my personal favorite and is particularly relevant to Instagram’s snappy-feeling performance. To put it in other words, don’t wait around for users to explicitly initiate an action they are likely to make. Desktop developers long ago applied a similar principle by introducing features like auto-save, thus saving people from the hair-pulling experience of losing hours of work in the event of an application failure.
The difference, in this case, is that Instagram isn’t trying to proactively perform actions users should perform but often don’t in order to spare them from a potential disaster. Rather, Instagram recognized that the inherent latency in the system detracts from the user experience and that they could create value for their users, and competitive advantage in the market, by designing to mitigate how we experience it.
The response by Krieger and his colleagues was to find moments in the user experience to initiate likely future actions before the user explicitly initiates them. Below is an image from Krieger’s presentation explaining how Instagram uploads images earlier in the editing process.
It’s not that Instagram somehow figured out how to increase your uplink bandwidth to move data packets from your device to the cloud faster. They simply started the upload process earlier, optimistically, before you posted the image so that by the time you were done putting the finishing touches on it and actually hit the “post” button the image was almost fully-uploaded. The feeling of posting an image was near immediate. Little to no latency. Very satisfying.
Anticipating user needs — and emotions — and designing around them is exactly the kind of design thinking that has made Instagram so successful. By performing actions optimistically, Instagram alleviated the negative experience of latency without having to fix the underlying root cause. As we at OX have learned time and again, Instagram knows that the experience is the difference that makes the difference.
