Website Response Times An Article by Jakob Nielsen www.nngroup.com Users really care about speed in interaction design...A snappy user experience beats a glamorous one, for the simple reason that people engage more with a site when they can move freely and focus on the content instead of on their endless wait. 0.1 seconds gives the feeling of instantaneous response. This level of responsiveness is essential to support the feeling of direct manipulation. 1 second keeps the user's flow of thought seamless. 10 seconds keeps the user's attention. A 10-second delay will often make users leave a site immediately. uxperformanceinteraction
The still life effect A Fragment by Paul Graham paulgraham.com If you're going to spend years working on something, you'd think it might be wise to spend at least a couple days considering different ideas, instead of going with the first that comes into your head. You'd think. But people don't. In fact, this is a constant problem when you're painting still lifes. You plonk down a bunch of stuff on a table, and maybe spend five or ten minutes rearranging it to look interesting. But you're so impatient to get started painting that ten minutes of rearranging feels very long. So you start painting. Three days later, having spent twenty hours staring at it, you're kicking yourself for having set up such an awkward and boring composition, but by then it's too late. ideasart