The waiting is the hardest part
Every day you see one more card
You take it on faith, you take it to the heart
The waiting is the hardest part

(Tom Petty, The Waiting)

... Days later (12/15/2006)

The wait has been long enough!

I have always been fascinated by the "power" of the few milliseconds it takes between the key press and onscreen reaction. They are usually inconsequential, but every so often they are the most frustrating thing in the world like when you are expecting something really important ( e.g. email, sms, phone call) or have to make a time-critical decision (e.g. selling stocks, calling for an emergency, navigating). This unnecessary stress is mostly due bad design, and falls into two categories. The first one is poor architecture and system design which make the device slow and unresponsive. The second is clueless UI design e.g. you get an uninformative clue "1 new message" which forces you to stop your activity and react to know the sender and topic. I will get back to clueless design in another post.

What truly puzzle me is that these few milliseconds are a legacy "feature" since electronic devices have been invented. No one has managed to get it right, and it's actually getting worse and worse.
What scares me is that my waiting tolerance is now of a "few" milliseconds... How's yours?