The Illusion of time
My grandfather was a watchmaker. When I was a child, I used to sit next to his huge wooden desk, watching him design and assemble clockworks made of dozens finicky pieces. The amount of patience, determination and precision he put into every facet of his designs was something I have always admired.
Watching a running clockwork for the first time felt like magic. While a computer’s insides’ looks rather cold and dull, a watch immediately captivates us with its beauty, craftsmanship and human touch.
It wasn’t until I was twelve when my grandfather finally offered me one. As he put it on my wrist, he said something I’ll never forget:
Remember, time is the most precious gift of all.
Maybe not as dramatic as uncle Ben’s last words in Spider-Man but it made an impact in the way I think about design ever since. Time is the most valuable and limited resource we have. That’s why good design is about saving time.
Time in the digital age
Designing digital experiences comes with an ingrained obsession. The obsession of speed and performance. Amazon calculated that an increased loading time of just one second could cost it $1.6 billion in sales each year. Google loses about 8 million searches (and ad displays) when page speed decreases by just four tenths of a second — scary shit!
So what do we do?
We create performance budgets, cut the mustard, run image optimizations, minify our JavaScript and CSS and cache our assets on servers located in the most exotic places around the globe.
There is a caveat though. First of all, faster doesn’t necessarily equate to better experience. Secondly, perception of time is highly subjective, or as Einstein aptly put:
An hour sitting with a pretty girl on a park bench passes like a minute, but a minute sitting on a hot stove seems like an hour.
Remember the last time you were on a bad date? Time suddenly runs painfully slow and the only thing you can think of is why you’re not sitting on your comfy couch back home, watching the latest episode of Game Of Thrones. There are many other, less hormone involved examples that come to mind.
When you stare at a watch, you can literally feel how time slows down. Sometimes it even feels like the watch is stopping for a second.
During holidays, time perception changes dramatically. The disproportionate amount of new impressions changes the way we feel about time. It’s why the first few days usually seem “slower” while days in a later stage fly by.
