ThinkFlood Blog

Earlier this year, the Consumer Electronics Association came out with a study that showed women are increasingly driving a greater share of technology purchases than men. Women’s heightened sense of shopping aside, it seems that the consumer electronics industry is finally warming to a discovery that has had significant impact in the home improvement industry: even in what seem like testosterone-heavy categories, women are controlling the purse strings.

Maybe I’m old-school, but I think men are still bigger gadget freaks. What seems to make more sense to me is that men are happy just to buy some technology, but that women tend to be the more discerning shoppers and therefore are making more of the decisions. At the same time, women may be finding some products that have real value for them.

Whatever the underlying cause, though, I think recognizing women’s influence in electronics purchasing decisions should have a positive impact on the product offerings that we will see going forward. I look at Philips as an example. It seems that a few years ago (i.e., a few years before most of their competitors) Philips marketers began to notice that women were an important part of the selling equation. As a result, their products began to offer a little more design sense, and their advertisements began to show more women consumers. Philips became the Target to the rest of the industry’s Wal-Mart.

I think the problem is that we still aren’t seeing enough companies following in the footsteps of Philips. Let’s take high definition television as an example.

Men love HDTV. Sports look great, action movies look great, and size matters, right? With men, bigger is better — more bragging rights, more assertiveness, more boldness. Guys want visitors to notice the 50″ or 70″ screens in our living rooms and to make comments.

Women seem a little less enamored with size. Instead of looking for a trophy piece, they seem to be asking the question, “How is the room going to look when the set is off and the screen is black?” And the answer isn’t really to just leave the TV on all the time for effect. Instead, women seem happier with smaller televisions, or at least sets that have a little more style or that are integrated into the surroundings (read “wall mounted” or “recessed”).

What’s a gadget-loving guy to do? If we want to convince our significant others that it really is okay to splurge on the bigger TV, we need to appease them somehow.

In addition to wall mounting and choosing a set that looks stylish, why not find a good use for the set when we aren’t watching TV? Televisions are great for displaying pictures — which both eliminates the black hole that would otherwise be there, and encourages more gadget envy from house guests.

Technology has made many amazing things possible. In fact, there are even some things that were science fiction a couple of decades ago which have become relatively commonplace now — such as realistic computer generated imagery in movies, or watching a television show on a handheld computing device. But there are a lot of things that we can do that we have chosen to leave alone. Why is that?

Forbes is currently running a series of articles on the future – what we say about it, how accurately we predict it, and so forth. Among these is an interesting piece by Neil Steinberg that considers some answers to this question:

Futurism has a tendency to take the products of today and merely extrapolate them. Thus TV becomes 3-D TV, cars become flying cars and telephones become video telephones. Sometimes it takes the sanity of the marketplace to dash cold water on those technological projections. We were all going to take our nutrition in pills until someone realized that preparing and consuming food was one of the primary joys of life, and no one wants to swallow food pills.

While it seems that Mr Steinberg’s choice of a technology to critique (video phones) is a little weak (webcams have taken off, and grandparents love them), I generally agree with the principle: just because we can do something doesn’t mean that we should.

Too often it seems that technologists get caught up with what is possible without considering what is valuable. Then it seems that there is a race to see who can come out with said technology first. Perhaps the saddest thing is that often there are less cutting edge technologies that are also possible, many times ore valuable, and tragically overlooked. The important thing is to examine what people want to do with their lives and figure out how technology can enable or simplify those things. Too often we seem to find ourselves looking at technology and trying to figure out how we can change our lives to match. Perhaps with a little perspective change our rate of progress would increase.

Although I have spent plenty of time around software developers and other IT types, I cut my teeth in sales and marketing. As a result, it always bothers me to hear people disparage the money end of the business by calling the good people out there cheats and liars. People in IT departments seem particularly annoyed at the folks in sales — it’s even kind of a major topic in Dilbert.

Now, I have to admit that there are salespeople out there that make my skin crawl. Indeed, I run the other way when I meet up with someone that can “sell ice to an Eskimo.” I’ve never liked feeling that the guy on the other end of the bargaining table was trying to pull a fast one on me, and I don’t enjoy haggling and the other games that people play.

Of course some people seem to enjoy the back and forth. My wife is one of them. Before we got married we stopped by a local jewelry store to pick out our wedding bands. We were there for quite some time, trying on different styles and sizes. Finally we found comfortable rings that we both liked. The store clerk that was helping us went to the backroom for a minute to get something, and my wife elbowed me.

“We should ask for a discount.”

“A discount? Why?”

“Because we’re buying two of them.”

“But everyone buys two wedding rings. That’s kind of the point.”

As soon as the clerk returned, my wife spoke up and asked for a discount. The clerk looked a little startled, and I’m sure I blushed. But then she said, “Okay, I can give you 10% off.” And so we saved some money.

The issue is that, to me, good salesmanship is all about trust — not something contrived, but real trust based on empathy and understanding, and delivering something that has value. I like to think that the product works as it is supposed to work, the price is what it is, and people buy if they feel that the value of the product meets or exceeds its price.

So I have to say that I really despise the classic “bait and switch” style of sales. While this may sound more like something that a con artist does than real-world, legitimate sales strategy, just about everyone is familiar with the concept of a “loss leader” or the “razor and blades” business model. To me, these are one and the same. Bring someone in under one pretense, and then commit them to something else that is more profitable. It is all about hidden costs and deceiving the customer, and I think it stinks.

Of course none of us is so naive that we underestimate what is going on. When we get a cellphone below cost from a wireless provider, we know that they aren’t offering charity — they are going to make all that money and more from us over the next couple of years while we are under contract to continue to use their service. But the relationship that this creates between buyer and seller is miserable. We will always feel that the service provider is trying to find a way to bump up costs on our monthly bill. And because we feel robbed of our freedom to walk away if their service turns out to be worse than we had anticipated, we are likely to be frustrated at even the most minor of service failures or inconveniences. Intuitively we understand that there is a disincentive for the service provider to do much to retain us, because our switching costs are high and so our tolerance for pain is also relatively high.

To me, this is all really an issue of usability. Or rather, usability is one way to evaluate the relationship between buyer and seller. It starts with the original purchase decision, and continues until the product is no longer useful or the term of service is over.

To me, loss leaders violate the usability principle of clarity, because they obscure the actual cost of the offering. They may also violate the principle of reliability, if there is confusion about the functionality or lifetime of the offering.

When it’s all said and done, as a consumer I will always choose the product that makes me feel most at ease. Though I might have to pay a bit more, at least I will not be looking over my shoulder wondering when it is going to break or when I will have to shell out more money for some adjunct service to make¬†the purchase worthwhile. As a vendor, I will always prefer to have my customers walk away feeling that they have chosen a product on its merits and paid a reasonable price, because then they will be most likely to recommend me to others, and to return to me in the future. In my opinion, this is the only sustainable way to do business.

Steve Jobs has gone on record at least a couple of times recently quoting from Alan Kay: “People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.” I think this is especially true when it comes to usability.

The mainstream arrival of the Internet over the last dozen years or so has brought about some amazing changes. Not least among these is the ability for motivated entrepreneurs to build and bootstrap new companies at unprecedented rates. This is a great thing for innovation and our economy, and I hope that it continues.

But there is one thing about the proliferation of these companies that bothers me: it seems that many people have begun to expect that great things can come easy. Now, I am not trying to belittle the hard work that these entrepreneurs are putting into their businesses — certainly it is no small task to start and run a successful business in any space. And certainly there are some great ideas out there that seem to be just made for the Internet experience through a browser. But in many cases I feel that we are compromising — sacrificing the ultimate goal of the product or service in order to make it run in a browser and to keep down startup costs.

For example, I am struck by the sheer number of photo sharing websites — by my count, there are more than three dozen of these out there right now. I suppose this is not surprising, because writing a basic photo sharing application is not too hard. As a result, many of these services are free (i.e., ad-supported), require occasional purchase of photo prints, or charge a relatively nominal fee. But given the sheer number of competitors and sometimes questionable revenue streams, it is easy to see that a day of reckoning will come relatively soon — only a handful of these services will survive.

I suppose this “natural selection” among competing services is good for consumers and everything, but I wonder if we are not simply headed for a mediocre solution. In other words, is a browser application really the best way to share pictures? Sure, browsers are ubiquitous, so just about anyone can participate. And personal computers today have graphics capabilities that are more than adequate for transmitting, storing, and displaying pictures. But is the ideal photo viewing experience a laptop monitor? Is it really so convenient to upload pictures one by one, or even with a batch upload utility as are available on some sites? And why do I have to fire up a web browser and navigate to a particular URL rather than have my pictures come to me?

I’m sure there are people who will think that I am crazy for saying that it is annoying to have to deal with life through a browser window. You may ask, “What could be more simple?” But the fact is that many companies are beginning to acknowledge that it is hard to exist as destination web sites. Indeed, social networking sites are all the rage right now because they garner such a large percentage of people’s time spent online. Other companies (even Internet juggernaut eBay) are struggling to cope. And then there is a whole contingent of people — mostly above the age of 35 — who simply do not have time to spend futzing with MySpace or Facebook pages.

The way I see it, social networking is only one step along a path. In the earlier days of the World Wide Web, academia opened the doors with online catalogs of information. Then came Internet-based retailing. Around that time, most businesses began to put up websites to provide information on their particular products or services, and perhaps to attract investors. From there it was financial institutions and some digital media clearing houses. Now it is social networks.

I’m not sure what the next step along this path will be, but I do believe that someday soon we will start to see the Internet shed its browser skin. I’m not talking about viewing web pages in miniature on mobile phones, either. Instead, I believe that eventually we will see more products and services offered over the Internet in specialized packages (the buzzword for this ten years ago was “Internet appliances”). The reason for this change will be usability.

We already see moves in this direction today. For the past couple of years there has been a movement to help browser-based applications break out of the static linked-page metaphor. Flash and AJAX accomplish this to some degree, and we now see the likes of Google and Microsoft battling it out to figure out how traditionally “rich client” applications such as word processors can benefit from being connected over the Internet. But I think the transformation will be more fundamental than this. While I believe there will continue to be a place for our multi-purpose personal computers, I also think that we will see a proliferation of more specialized devices. In the same way that a chef does not prepare a meal using a Swiss Army knife, we will stop trying to shoehorn many tasks onto our laptops, desktops, and cell phones. Instead, we will choose the form factor (i.e., hardware) that makes the most sense for that particular application.

Unfortunately, it is hard to say when this change will take place. Personally, I believe that the building blocks are there. WiFi networking is everywhere, and it only costs a couple of dollars to build WiFi into a device, so it should be easy to get these devices online. And we have been putting small computers into increasingly more mundane devices for at least a couple of decades now. But I fear that one thing standing in the way of this change is the mindset among entrepreneurs. Many see that it is relatively easy to get funding if they can scape together a beta version of a browser-application on their own. By contrast, prototyping a hardware device and writing software for it (in addition to the server-side software for the service itself) can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

But I believe the fact remains as Mr Kay stated it, that those “who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.” But then I’m not going to wait around for others to figure this out, either. To take another famous line from the same speech, “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”

I’ve gotta go — lots of work to do.

According to a University of California Berkeley study, we snap about 75 billion pictures each year — and that’s only traditional film photography. Although we have become accustomed to hearing about figures in this range (hundreds of billions spent on the Iraq war, 6.5 billion people on the earth, the combined wealth of Bill Gates and friend Warren Buffett or the Walton family), 75 billion is a huge number. To put it in perspective, counting from 1 to 75 billion would take almost 800 years of non-stop effort (assuming a sustained counting rate of 3 numbers per second).

The real question is why — why do we bother to take this many pictures? Is our intention to frame them and show them off in our homes and workplaces? Do we take pictures to send to family and friends? Or do we use pictures to remind us of events, people, and places?

Of course all of these answers are correct to a greater or lesser degree, but I think there is a more fundamental reason: pictures are an insurance policy against forgetfulness. I began to consider this idea a bit in my last blog posting, and it has been gnawing at me ever since. In my experience, the vast majority of the pictures that we take do not go into frames or even albums – most remain with the envelope in which we received them from the print shop, or tucked into shoeboxes under a bed — at best, we insert them into photo albums that collect dust on a shelf. Rarely do we take out these pictures to review them — whether or not we have the intention of doing so.

In other words, pictures fill our desire to cling to our memories, to prevent ourselves from forgetting a time and place in our experience. In this way, pictures are self-promoting. When we see an old photograph, we are so shocked about how muddled the details have become in our minds that we yearn for a means to hold on and improve what we remember. But right there in front of us is the answer — a picture that retains every detail with complete integrity, which stimulates our recall just enough that we can see things close to how they really were. In a world where we are bombarded with so much information that we cannot possibly recall it all efficiently, pictures serve as on-demand mind probes that give us a degree of control over our memories.

As nice as this insurance policy against forgetfulness may be, the potential exists for our pictures to be something greater. The fundamental problem we have been dealing with for the past century or so is convenience. Pictures collect dust on shelves and in shoeboxes because it simply is not convenient to sort through them regularly, to rotate them through the frames on our walls and desks every few weeks, or to find time to choose the best ones to reprint and send to family and friends. Sure, if we had the time, we would enjoy going back through all those old memories — sharpening our recall a bit and correcting our perspective on history. But who has time to do it all?

The fact is, few of us have or will take the time to sit down and flip through a photo album on a regular basis. Rather, we have a handful of our favorite or most cherished pictures that we frame and display so that we can catch a quick glimpse and jog our memories briefly as we go about other tasks.

Now let’s imagine a world in which at least some of those frames that draw our glance from time to time actually have rolling content — that more or less each time we look, we see a different memory. Of course this is not science fiction — today’s digital picture frames can pull off this trick, and they are becoming more affordable by the week.

But why should we limit our use of pictures to our recall? One of the powerful things about pictures is that they can be a vehicle for sharing memories and experiences with others as much as reliving them ourselves. Our society reveres photographs that speak to our collective conscious through media such as National Geographic Magazine — enough that we almost seem to understand, for example, what it is to look at the earth from space, though almost none of us have ever had (or may ever have) that experience.

Of course if bringing out pictures for our own review is cumbersome, then sharing them with others is at least doubly so, with the result being that we do it all too infrequently. And there we rob each other of the opportunity to expand our understanding and experience. Once again, however, technology can make this process easier, enabling us to zap pictures across the world almost in less time than it takes for us to think of doing so.

Unfortunately, it seems that the right mix of technology to make these activities truly convenient may not be out there yet. For all of their promise, digital picture frames still seem limited in many ways (picture size and quality, software functionality, convenient access to new media, styling), especially when we consider the benefit we receive for the cost. And photo sharing sites have yet to sufficiently mediate the inconvenience of uploading pictures — or managing who sees what and when. But we have to expect that eventually someone will get these things right, and then we will be able to realize the latent potential that exists in our pictures today — the ability to enhance our memories and grow our understanding and appreciation of the world and each other. These goals seem worth the effort of taking another 75 billion pictures or so next year.

This week my oldest daughter is “star of the week” in her second grade class. Over the weekend, we helped her make a poster to bring to class to share a little about herself with her class. My wife sat down with her to come up with some interesting trivia (favorite food, favorite book, etc), while I went through our photo library to pull out some representative pictures of the last seven years.

Whenever I go back through old pictures, I am always struck by how different people look than I imagine them. Generally, I think I have a pretty good memory. But it seems that when we are around someone every day, it’s too easy to lose track of how they change. Sometimes it is unnerving, but in the end, I’m glad that pictures keep us honest.

Last month I wrote a little bit about how people still seem to be stuck on printing their digital pictures. Today my goal is to further develop the case for keeping everything digital by comparing the experience of viewing printed pictures with viewing them on a display device such as a monitor.

After our third child was born a couple of years ago, my wife and I decided that we should have our family sit down for a professional photographer. After some struggles to get the children to sit still, we managed to take some great pictures, which we then had printed on canvas and framed. Altogether we bought three pictures: a large, 20″ x 24″ shot of the whole family, and two slightly smaller shots, one of the children, and one of my wife and me. Total cost: about $2,200.

Of course it is certainly possible to go to a mall or department store and get some 8″ x 10″ prints for $30 or $40, but this size is about the limit of what we can achieve with 35mm film and glossy prints — anything larger begins to look noticeably grainy. To have real portraits taken and printed is many times more expensive, meaning that this opportunity is rare or even out of reach for most families.

Now let’s consider a different viewing experience: what we get from our televisions. Most living/family¬†room television sets today measure at least 30″ in diagonal – roughly the size of the large 20″ x 24″ frame that we purchased. But today even a 30″ television looks puny compared with the monstrous high definition television sets that we seem to be gobbling up. Measuring 40″, 50″, even 65″ or more along the diagonal, we (at least the males of our race) are transfixed by the stunning colors and detail that we see on these screens. These mammoth TVs must have resolution far surpassing 35mm film, right?

Actually, no. Currently the state-of-the-art in consumer digital television is so-called “Full HD” – also known as 1080p. This format provides 1,080 lines of vertical resolution and 1,920 lines of horizontal resolution, or roughly about 2 million picture elements (megapixels). Now, all of you digital camera lovers out there know that 2 megapixels is actually not such a big deal. In fact, today a decent, $250 point-and-shoot camera from a name brand such as Canon or Nikon generally offers 5-7 megapixel resolution, and fancy single lens reflex (SLR) cameras get up to 10, 16, or even 21 megapixels. This means that the pictures my wife snaps using the ultracompact camera she carries in her purse actually oversample the resolution of an HDTV by at least 2X to 4X. And while there appears to be some debate about how to compare 35mm film resolution to what we get with a digital camera, this study from Professor John Hart at the University of Colorado suggests that we achieve roughly the same result using a 10 megapixel digital SLR as with a 35mm film SLR. In other words, digital pictures can look amazing on an HDTV measuring up to several feet in diagonal, while similar prints begin to look tired once they are larger than a piece of letter-size paper.

How can we account for this difference? I believe the issue is reflective media versus luminous media. In the case of a print, we are viewing light bouncing off the surface of the picture. Especially in the case of photos with a matte finish (where reflected light is more diffuse), it is relatively easy to see minor defects in picture quality. By contrast, in the case of luminous displays – such as televisions and monitors – the brightness of the display itself tends to wash out minor defects. Thus, when we look at pictures on these devices, we can enlarge the image many times more — giving us a more premium viewing experience. If we consider the cost of a professional photo shoot, canvas printing, and custom framing, all of a sudden what was once a rare luxury with printed pictures can now be standard fare with digital display technology.

Consistency is another one of these principles — right alongside what I’ve called “familiarity” — that seems to automatically make most people’s list of usability concepts. It’s a relatively easy case to make: consistent design can make it easier for people to navigate new applications and new functionality, while inconsistent design often confuses.

As with familiarity, I also believe that consistency is an important principle — one that we should try to implement where possible — but I also worry that consistency taken too far can be problematic. As Mark Twain said, “To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” If we find ourselves struggling against reason to shoe-horn a design into our favorite mold, we should step back and reconsider.

To me, the problem with consistency — and the reason it comes last on my list — is that it does not really solve any problems. In other words, consistency alone does not make interfaces intuitive, it only helps us if we already understand the original intent. That said, consistency can be a big help to “expert” users (for example, keyboard shortcuts for cut, copy, paste, undo, open, close, and new are just about the same in most graphical applications today), and lack of consistency can be a real problem.

Consistency is relatively easy to achieve in software applications today. Back in the mid 1980s, Apple began publishing a series of books called Inside Macintosh. The early books in the series read like a style guide for GUI applications – how many pixels tall the title bar in a window should be, the proper offset for buttons, how to implement text scrolling, etc. Later, however, these books morphed into documentation for the Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that Apple provided to developers as part of the operating system. Today, few developers bother to challenge the building blocks of user interface, instead choosing to rely upon the APIs built into the operating system. While this approach has dramatically accelerated the rate of GUI application development, it also presents a barrier to customizing interfaces around a particular task or function.

On one extreme, HTML makes it particularly easy to achieve a consistent user interface with minimal effort. A few words in a text document are all that we need to program our browsers to spit out buttons, text boxes, labels, check boxes, and drop down lists. On the other hand, these tools are not always appropriate, and it is in many ways harder to implement a custom control on a web page using JavaScript than to make a custom control for a Windows, Mac, or Linux desktop application. The other extreme may be video games, where user interfaces are often unique to each game. On the web, content seems to matter more than interface; in the video game, interface matters as much or more than content.

So, what’s the answer? When should we strive for consistency, and when should we break the mold to deliver a unique interface that is optimized for an application? I believe that we should consider consistency alongside one of the earlier usability principles: proximity. Given two conceptually proximate functions (for example, undo, cut, copy, and paste are nearly universal functions today), we should strive to maintain a consistent interface (in this case, the same keyboard shortcuts, placement of these commands at the top of the Edit menu).

I have written about the iPhone before, so please forgive me for bringing it up again here. One thing that I like about the iPhone is that its interface is tailored to the device. The home screen is reminiscent of that other easy to use device, the Palm Pilot — with application icons laid out in a grid, the four most major of which run along the bottom of the screen. By contrast, the iPAQ/PocketPC/Windows Mobile interface stubbornly retains the Start menu, a Desktop, a Control Panel, and windows stacked in Z-order throughout the operating system. Personally, I do not feel that these patterns work nearly as well on a small screen and without mouse or keyboard as they do on a regular personal computer. However, I think it would be confusing if devices like the iPhone or the Palm Pilot had strikingly different interfaces within each application. Thus, functions that are proximate to one another — physically (i.e., on the same device) or conceptually (i.e., playing the same role) — should have similar interfaces. The further apart two functions are, the more we should be willing to tailor their particular environments.

Responsiveness may not seem like a usability principle on its surface — generally the solution is more about technical implementation than an elegant design or some principle of cognitive science — but who among us does not get frustrated from time to time when waiting for the hourglass cursor? More than mere annoyance, devices that are slow to respond can hinder our productivity and creativity — we lose our train of thought while we wait, and then it takes some time get back to where we were, if we ever arrive there at all.

People have been comparing the Macintosh and Windows operating systems for a couple of decades now, but to me one of the biggest differences between the latest and greatest of these (Vista and OS X) is responsiveness. Macs boot faster, launch applications more quickly, and generally respond to mouse clicks and keyboard input with a fluid-like simplicity that defines elegance. Most Linux distributions are also relatively zippy — even when running on yesterday’s hardware.

Of course we may be able to trace some of the slowness of Windows back to a lack of minimalism — after all, this is the operating system for all devices, from the cell phone to the supercomputer — but there is more to responsiveness than simply streamlined application code.

Without access to source code I have no real way of proving what I am about to say, but in observing the Mac OS, it seems to me that some of Apple’s gratuitous animations have more purpose than simply evoking a “wow” factor. For example, consider what happens when we launch an application. At the very least, the operating system has to load the application into memory, and in memory-constrained situations it also has to page out other applications to make room. Then there are application initialization steps (Adobe applications are notoriously slow here), which may involve caching information from other files on disk, opening network connections, or even initializing devices.

In the Windows world, when we launch an application nothing much happens right away — depending on the vendor, the software may display a splash screen, but generally we wait while the program launches. Even worse, in most cases the outline of a window draws, but the display freezes or slows while some preprocessing takes place before the rest of the screen is painted.

The Mac is a little different. An icon in the dock begins to bounce, and continues to do so until the application window comes up. And when the window appears, it draws to completion without an appreciable pause in the middle. Do Mac applications launch faster? Somewhat. But more than a faster launch, there are clues to us that something is going on. That is, rather than sit and wonder whether the application we have just tried to launch is in the process of coming up, we can see the bouncing icon and know that help is on way.

Now, I’m not a huge fan of the bouncing icon trick, but the point is that this action is a means of communicating with the user, which has the effect of making the whole process seem more immediate and responsive. Some may ask what the cost is. After all, we would not want to slow down the process further simply to make things look better, right? In fact, however, the things that take the most time during application launch (reading the program from disk, paging out other applications, opening network connections) require relatively little muscle from the central or graphics processing units — they are I/O-limited operations. Why not use a few of those spare processor cycles to entertain/inform the user of what is going on?

In fact, there are a handful of controls that we rely on for this kind of operation, such as the aforementioned hourglass (or wristwatch) cursor, animated spinning wheels/beachballs, and progress bars. Of these, I prefer a well-implemented progress bar, because it actually gives me an idea of how long I will need to wait.

In addition to these small animations, however, there is another point that I was trying to draw out, and that is the issue of screen refresh. Not only does it look poor when a window begins to paint but then freezes, it also begins to remind us of how applications look when they crash. To me, a half-painted window always seems to be a sign of application instability — an uneasy feeling that I could do without. Rather than rush to paint the outline of the window, why not provide the intermediate animation for a little longer, and then paint everything at once?

Responsiveness takes a backseat to many of the other usability principles, because it does not help us learn or understand an interface better. However, certainly a slow application can be the cause of much frustration and even confusion, so we should be mindful of this principle in our designs. At the very least, when our applications do require some extended processing or waiting time, we should provide feedback and status information to keep users informed.