Review By: Peter Gabris
11/24/2008Have you ever heard about the time-anchor matrix? Do user complaints about slowness of your application bother you? Then grab this book and read it! Author Steven C. Seow is a forensic and experimental psychologist working for Microsoft as a User Researcher. In this book, he explains why users complain about the speed of an application even if a stopwatch clearly shows that this application runs faster than the competition. Moreover, you will learn neat tricks to turn around user's perception without actually speeding up the code.

The applications built by the company I work for are reasonably fast. We use the most recent technologies and are meticulous in design and best practices. Still, after reading this book, I went and changed the way reports are presented. Now the redesign of a file upload process is on the drawing board. Those are changes most people like--change that has a lot of impact with little coding and even less testing required.

If you are a novice, you can pick good patterns from this book, especially about wait-time handling. This book is a rare find. The subject matter is rare and so is the depth of the analysis. In this book, you get so much information and even some pictures, examples, and a bunch of exposed bloopers on less than 200 pages.