The perception of time in design

9 min readMar 31, 2025

In our digital and super-fast-paced world, time perception and thinking about time, in general, have become crucial aspects of our daily lives. Time perception influences how we experience everything from mundane tasks to significant events. It affects how we navigate our increasingly busy schedules, enjoy ourselves, and spend most of our day.

Our relationship with time is shaped by rapid technological advancements and constant stimuli that demand our attention. This has led to a notable decline in our attention spans, which has affected our ability to focus on both digital and physical interactions. The current pace of our lives often leaves us feeling rushed and overwhelmed as we juggle multiple responsibilities while trying to stay connected. This, in turn, not only affects our productivity but also alters our perception of time itself.

As designers and creators, understanding how people perceive time can significantly influence the effectiveness of our work. By acknowledging the shrinking attention spans and the need for meaningful interactions, we can create experiences that resonate well with users’ emotional states. Whether through architecture, product design, or digital interfaces, being aware of time perception allows us to craft experiences that help users avoid frustration and foster a sense of connection and engagement with brands and products.

This article explores the complex relationship between design and time perceptions, examining how designers across different domains use techniques to alter emotional responses to time.

For years, researchers have been trying to determine the specific brain areas responsible for our perception of time. They found that a large network of neural areas affects time processing.

Through this research, they recognized that attention and emotional state play an integral role in how we feel the passing of time:

Unoccupied time feels longer than occupied
Uncertain wait feels longer than confident, transparent wait
Unexplained wait feels longer than an explained wait
Anxiety makes waits feel longer

Manipulating time perception through design

Product/service designers from various industries tailor their design process and thinking around provoking particular emotions and feelings for the users. Time perception is one of the most important parts of our interactions with the designed environment, service, or product.

We expect service to be quick and efficient, we want websites to load faster and faster, we are always in a hurry, and to be satisfied with the product or service, it needs to be designed around our expectations and needs.

Physical Design

Physical product and service design includes designing every experience and interaction users have while interacting with a product or using a service physically. Elements such as spatial layout, materials, and sensory stimuli play essential roles. Time perception can be crucial for a good experience in places like Airports, shopping malls, hotels, restaurants, etc.

“Unoccupied time feels longer than occupied time” — Active engagement

IKEA Showrooms— The Design of the showrooms lets users explore various room setups and product displays. It creates a sense of discovery and engagement, leading customers to spend more time in the store than they initially planned.

The immersive experience can make users feel like time is going slowly as they become absorbed in visualizing how products would fit into their own homes. While users spend more time exploring and seeing different products, they are more likely to make purchases along the way. In this case, both attention and emotional state are in play. Users are distracted, and they are not focused on time, and their emotions are positive as they imagine their beautiful homes.

“Uncertain wait feels longer than confident, transparent wait”— Transparency

Call centers, Healthcare services, and theme parks — to make waiting time seem shorter, these establishments usually provide estimated wait times and the number in the queue, and offering clear and accurate estimates helps manage expectations.

A study by Chase Manhattan Bank in the 1990s found that customer perception of wait times, not actual duration, was the primary determinant of satisfaction. This led to the redesign of their branch experience — Adding digital queue systems showing estimated wait time and the position in the queue, making wait time visible and transparent.

The result from the redesign: customers reported higher satisfaction with longer waits in the new system than with shorter waits in the old system.

“Unexplained wait feels longer than an explained wait” — Visibility

Open kitchen design — Open kitchen design can be a great example of a design choice that helps reduce the perceived waiting time. This way, customers feel more engaged in the culinary journey, visual transparency dimistifies the waiting process, and the waiting becomes part of the experience.

“Anxiety makes waits feel longer” — Clarity

Anxiety can cause hyper-focused attention on passing time and reduces the ability to engage in distractions. This causes time to slow down dramatically.

Airport security checkpoints can be a great trigger for anxiety. In many locations, they have been redesigned to reduce anxiety through clearer instructions, transparent processes, and sometimes ambient sounds.

Time perception in physical design can be altered through the use of technology as well as architectural planning. As long as a person’s emotional state and attention are taken into consideration.

Digital Experience Design

In digital interactions, time perception is one of the most important parts of the experience and directly affects the satisfaction and engagement of users.

Time/duration-related aspects that affect experience:

Response time

The response is a reaction that the system has to users’ actions. The quicker the response time, the more in control the user feels. Response time under 0.1 seconds feels like an instant response from the system, giving users the feeling of causing the actions and being in control. This quick response is important in mouse movements, selections, clicks, or drags.
According to Jakob Nielsen, users can detect delays in responses longer than 0.1 seconds. For navigating between pages, an acceptable response time is 1 second; if it is slower than that, users will visit fewer pages.

Loading time

The initial loading time of a website. It is an essential factor in retaining users, as they are very likely to abandon the website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. Generally, your website should load as fast as possible.

Progress indication

Progress indication is used to inform users about the status of the ongoing process. Well-designed indications can help manage their expectation, reduce frustration and uncertainty, and enhance satisfaction.

Let’s explore how the principles we analyzed earlier are used in digital experience design:

“Unoccupied time feels longer than occupied time.”

To occupy users before the system is going through a background process or simply during a passive wait, like waiting for a delivery, some brands incorporate small “games” and interactions to distract users and turn the passive waiting into an occupied wait.

Wolt has a fun way of occupying impatient users.

Once you press the time circle, it creates a fun interaction with different products.
If you continue to press it quickly, it opens a hidden game where you have to tap very quickly.
It becomes a competition against yourself or the wolt team and is a fun destruction.

“Uncertain wait feels longer than confident, transparent wait.”

Just like in service design, communicating estimated time and making the process transparent reduces the negative emotions associated with the wait and alters the perception of duration.

To make the wait transparent, designing status updates and progress indications with explanations provibe clarity and the feeling or confidence and safety.
Many delivery companies include live maps, which create a high level of transparency and certainty as users can follow the driver in real time and know exactly what’s happening.

“Unexplained wait feels longer than an explained wait.”

To explain the wait to the users, brands use carefully crafted UX writing, sometimes in combination with beautiful animated loaders.

By avoiding simple spinners and including just the two lines of text, you can change users’ perceptions and increase their satisfaction with the simple design choice.

Include visually appealing, fun but functional loaders that are associated with the product and brand. They work as a distraction from the passage of time.
Use words to communicate the state of the system and create a sense of clarity.

“Anxiety makes waits feel longer.”

To reduce anxiety in the digital experience, we need to cover all the other principles mentioned above.

Anxiety can be common when interacting with products like digital banks, airline apps, and hospital websites or any product that deals with sensitive personal information or is used only during time-sensitive tasks.

General tips for reducing time-based anxiety:

Reduce response time to a minimum and make sure every element has states like hover, press, loading, etc. The last thing you want is for an anxious user to feel like your platform does not respond to their actions.
Don’t just throw a spinner in the middle of the page; communicate what is happening and what background processes the system goes through.
If the user has to wait for a long time, provide an estimated duration and be transparent.
Utilize patterns like push notifications and live activities to keep users informed of the progress without additional hassle.

Dynamic content delivery / Short-form content

Another great example of how design can manipulate the perception of time is short-form content like TikTok videos, Instagram Reels, or YouTube shorts.

Social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok leverage fast-paced content delivery to alter users’ perception of time spent on the app. The dynamic content delivery of short videos creates a feeling of continuous engagement, leading users to lose track of how much time they have spent scrolling through their feeds.

This design strategy exploits the psychological concept of “flow,” where users become so deeply engaged in content that they are unaware of the actual duration spent on the platform.

For me, this is a dark pattern and will have long-term consequences in human behaviour and interaction with technology in the future.

Short-form videos are instant gratification through quick content
They contribute greatly to our reduced attention span
They decrease peoples’ ability to maintain focus

In this design strategy, the “Unoccupied time feels longer than occupied time” principle is in action. People are so occupied that they completely misgudge the passage of time. And with the help of personalization algorithms, we become so hooked on the content tailored to us that it becomes increasingly difficult to fight the urge of doom scrolling.

I do think this new way of consuming information and having dynamic content delivery will eventually cause people to demand quicker responses from digital and physical services and provide new challenges for designers to find better ways to manipulate time perception.

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