Forty years of research on system response times - What did we learn from it?

Abstract

With the advent of time sharing computer systems in the late 1960s, temporal factors came into the focus of human-computer interaction (HCI). To the present author's knowledge, NICKERSON et al. (1968) and CARBONELL, et al. (1968) were the first authors to point to the psychological importance of involuntary delays in HCI. They concluded that computer-system originated waiting times should either be rather short, thus preventing the work flow from being interrupted, or be long enough to allow for the so-called job swapping which means executing another task during the waiting period. © 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.