Think About the Timing!

Time and people's perceptions of it is a growing field in digital design. When you think ahead are you thinking of how people will perceive the pace and timing of your project? Sure for menu-driven content it's fairly straight forward but what about when your giant-file multi-touch apps start going live on the web? TIMING.

Here's some advice

1. Load behind the scenes - Whenever possible pre-load work behind the scenes. Actionscript is great for this. Don't just load assets on the fly, make them appear quicker with preloading.
   
   
2. Divert attention - People aren't idiots but they aren't all savants either. If you give someone something quirky or fun to look at while loading then you'll improve the general feel of your app. A small animation of loading is better than none at all.
   
   
3. Preemptive start - An old-hat trick for NES developers was a "Start" menu. The start menu allowed all sorts of pre-caching to happen behind the scenes. It slows the user down while preventing them from feeling like the app is stalling.
   
   
4. Load indicator - Whenever possible tell people how far along their load is. This is a real life-saver when it comes to programs that take over 10 seconds to load. Don't bother for apps under 10 seconds though.
   
   
5. Don't interrupt! Do the bulk of loading up-front. People are MUCH more forgiving if you load before hand than in the middle of their session!