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Comment by titanix88 | Hacker News Reader

Apparently imperceptible differences in latency can be felt vividly through break of habit.

A couple of years back, I didn't have any experience with online games and was introduced to a popular one by one of my friends. As we were playing some introductory matches, 400ms latency connection felt very instantaneous to me, while he felt super annoyed and advised me to change my ISP. Some months after changing my ISP and regularly playing the game, I could instinctively feel the difference between a 60ms connection and a 120ms connection.

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I invented a few terms for it, Latency Sensitive or Hyper Sensitivity. I thought I was having this weird latency intolerances that not many ones has, turns out I am not alone.

Most test and site you play seems to show our maximum response rate to click at somewhere between 200ms to 300ms, with most scoring 250ms+ range. And yet we can still feel the difference. And this latency problem sometimes causes me breathing and heart beat problems when things dont align with what I expected to in response time. Sometimes doing things too quickly isn't always the best option either.

It is the same with Apple's Retina Display, 20/20 eyesight, viewing distance etc, but given those condition you can still feel the difference between a 300ppi and 400ppi.

And the iPad ProMotion is really buttery smooth, it still isn't perfect though, I am not sure what frame rate do we need to a point where we cant tell the difference.

I wish latency are taken more seriously in UX and design. Hopefully Apple will lead the pack again.

> Most test and site you play seems to show our maximum response rate to click at somewhere between 200ms to 300ms, with most scoring 250ms+ range. And yet we can still feel the difference.

I think when you interact with a UI (or a physical object, for that matter), you're projecting an expectation into the future relative to your sense perception of the action. So the ~250ms delay applies to both the action and reaction, thereby effectively canceling out.

>Hopefully Apple will lead the pack again.

Like when they made a calculator that fails to calculate correctly if you push buttons too fast?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15538666

Definitely applicable because it's talking about UI latency... and Apple.

The value of habits/muscle memory should never be underestimated.

And why i feel that KDE did the unix world a disservice when they went from emulating Windows to try to be their own thing in KDE4. As long as KDE behaved closely to Windows out of the box, one could more easily get people to give desktop unix a try over the longer term. This because the initial experience would not be as jarring.

Similarly observe the backlash Microsoft got for Windows 8.

Sadly the FOSS world seems overrun with designers and busybodies that want to pad their resume these days.

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