Response Time and Display Rate in Human Performance with Computers

Abstract

The pace of human-computer interaction is an important issue to computer scientists and computer users alike. Experimental results have begun to shed some light on this complex, controversml, and vital subject. This paper revmws the theory and reports on experimental results concerning display rates, response time expectations and attitudes, user productivity, and variability. The decomposition of concerns and tasks helps to clarify the issues, but substanhal effort remains before a predictive model can emerge. In general, the results indicate that frequent users prefer response times of less than a second for most tasks, and that productwlty does increase as response time decreases. However, error rates increase with too short or too long a response time. Users pick up the pace of the system, but the profile of commands may change with the speed of the system. © 1984, ACM. All rights reserved.