JavaTM Look and Feel Design Guidelines: Advanced Topics > Part II: Special Topics > 6: Responsiveness

6: Responsiveness

Responsiveness, as defined by Jeff Johnson in his book GUI Bloopers: Don'ts and Do's for Software Developers and Web Designers, is "the software's ability to keep up with users and not make them wait." Responsiveness is often cited as the strongest factor in users' satisfaction with software applications and has been linked to users' productivity, as well.

Poor responsiveness can render an otherwise well-designed application unusable. Maximizing the responsiveness of your application is among the best ways that you can improve its usability and help ensure its success.

This chapter provides guidelines for designing responsiveness into your application. To help you understand the guidelines, the chapter also:

• Lists characteristics of responsive applications and problems of unresponsive ones
• Explains how responsiveness relates to performance and response delay
• Describes ways to measure response delays
• Describes ways to improve responsiveness and provide operational feedback to users

This chapter draws heavily from the work of usability expert Jeff Johnson. To learn more about how to design for responsiveness, read his book GUI Bloopers. This chapter also draws from the work of performance experts Steve Wilson and Jeff Kesselman. For a discussion of responsiveness as it relates to performance, read their book Java Platform Performance: Strategies and Tactics. These books are described in "Related Books" on page 4.

Java Look and Feel Design Guidelines: Advanced Topics. Copyright 2001. Sun Microsystems, Inc. All Rights Reserved.