Accessibility

Flex Article

 

Designing for Flex – Part 7: Making your application fast


Rob Adams

Rob Adams

Adobe
www.usereccentric.com

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Eliminating work
  3. Shortening tasks
  4. Automating work
  5. Providing starting points
  6. Improving responsiveness
  7. Managing expectations
Comments
Created:
20 December 2007
User Level:
Intermediate
Products:
Flex

If you were hoping this chapter would delve into technical details on performance tuning in Flex, my apologies to disappoint you. Although I will discuss some design techniques for improving the responsiveness of networked Flex applications, this chapter primarily focuses on efficiency of use, or giving users a faster and more productive experience overall.

There are several aspects of applications that can lead to reductions in user productivity. One of them is certainly application sluggishness; if users have to wait for disks to spin and algorithms to crunch and networks to pipe bits back and forth for too long, it breaks their concentration and interferes with their goals. However, when users must re-enter information they provided previously or provide data the application could have figured out on its own, this also negatively impacts the user's perception of the application's performance. Depending on the situation, it may be acceptable to wait an extra second or two for the application to load if it means spending less time performing rote tasks once it does. When determining how to make your application faster, you must first consider how best to speed up the user, and only speed up the system if that is truly the most important barrier to productivity. (For example, a user researcher friend of mine once interviewed users of one of our applications asking which performance problems irritated them the most, expecting to hear about sluggish operations and spinning hourglass cursors. To his surprise many of the responses he received did not complain about system performance, but about how it took them too many steps to complete frequent tasks!)

This chapter covers:

  • How to eliminate unnecessary steps from common user tasks.
  • How to find ways to automate repetitive tasks and remember information.
  • How to give users a head start by providing good application starting points.
  • How to improve your application's responsiveness by focusing on the parts that make the biggest difference to users.
  • How to manage user expectations for operations that are necessarily time consuming.

The Designing for Flex series includes the following articles:

I suggest that you read the previous parts before proceeding with this part of the series.

Download all parts of the FIG series as PDF files that you can print and read offline: adobe_flex_interface_guide.zip (ZIP, 5.7MB)

This content is a public draft. Please give us feedback in the Flex Interface Guide Forum.

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License.

Page 1 of 6
Next Page

About the author

Rob Adams works for Adobe Systems, Inc. in San Francisco, California. He started at Macromedia, Inc. in 2004 and has worked on the Flash authoring tool, Flash Player, and Fireworks, but nowadays works primarily on the Flex product line. He is involved with the design of the core framework itself as well as the designer/developer tools such as Flex Builder and Creative Suite. Although his primary focus is on design research, he also does some design work, promotes sound design practices both within Adobe and without, and makes himself a general pain in the necks of the designers, product managers, and engineers he works with.