How annoying is too annoying?

Apparently typing latency doesn&#x27;t annoy me at all. I think I just queue up what I&#x27;m going to type &quot;in my fingers&quot;; it&#x27;s a one-directional process, and in general I don&#x27;t have to see the letters before I keep typing whatever is in my queue.<p>What <i>does</i> annoy me about user interface latency: when a page loads slowly, I try to click something, the layout changes at the last minute, and I end up clicking something else. That&#x27;s an example of a full feedback loop where my actions aren&#x27;t coming directly from me. They&#x27;re dependent on what I&#x27;m seeing on the page.

I thought the buttons at the top (&quot;Fine&quot;, &quot;Could be worse&quot;, ...) were survey answers. Nope, they are how you choose the input latency.<p>The &quot;We&#x27;re done here&quot; button is only 200 ms, and &quot;Surprise me&quot; only goes up to 500 ms. I have experienced far worse and variable latencies over Windows Remote Desktop and SSH due to bad Internet connections - like multi-second delays. This demo pales in comparison to the real world.

I think the experience of annoyance would be very different if you are forced to &quot;break your flow&quot;. E.g. if you need to correct some characters at the end or insert something in the middle of what you have already typed because then the feedback is <i>much</i> more important.<p>If I just keep typing typing typing without need to worry about correction, the annoyance is probably minimal. I could just ignore the latency, close my eyes, and keep typing, assuming I have really high touch-typing accuracy. (I know that&#x27;s something I sometimes do when I face high latency in real usage.)<p>Maybe a better and more meaningful simulation is to show some random sentences that you have to read and type, and then randomly <i>force</i> you to make some corrections as you go along (e.g. suddenly change the last word from &quot;their&quot; to &quot;they&#x27;re&quot;), to simulate <i>you</i> having mistyped something.

On my iPhone I find everything up to maybe 0.6 seconds to be just fine. Part of this may be being used to using SSH over VERY poor network connections.<p>I think the biggest frustration with latency is not the latency itself, but rather when latency is combined with the possibility that what you entered didn&#x27;t register at all and the time pressure of having only 15 seconds of signal to submit your command - situations that often occur when using Internet based sessions in the wild.<p>The other source of annoyance is trying to &quot;not crash the system&quot;. Often when a system presents high latency like this, I tend to consciously pay attention to how many &quot;buffered&quot; inputs I&#x27;m sending for fear of crashing something, and that self-throttling can get tiring.

This page is super misleading at least in Safari on Mac. The latency number appears to actually be a minimum delay between each letter. 200ms latency should mean that each letter appears 200ms after you press the key. But if you type reasonably fast on the 200ms setting, the screen gets farther and farther behind the keyboard, to the point where I can end up waiting many seconds for the text to finish showing up after I&#x27;m done typing.<p>As a result, this is going to make moderate to high latencies look <i>way, way</i> worse than they really are.

You need much larger variable latency range to be truly annoying.<p>I&#x27;m talking high enough that someone backspacing over a mistake will think that the interface didn&#x27;t receive the input. So they do another backspace.<p>To get it just right you&#x27;d probably trigger the initial backspace callback <i>immediately after</i> the user types a 2nd backspace. Then wait a long time before triggering the 2nd backspace callback. Since the original problem character has been removed the user will most likely try to continue typing. Finally, update the queue of characters all at once-- starting with the 2nd backspace. Now the latency has caused a character right before the queue to get eaten.<p>This is how you cause people to throw their device against a wall.

For me nothing much changed up to &quot;really not great&quot; - only then did I start to notice the delay.<p>But &quot;variable latency mode&quot;? That made me more nostalgic than annoyed. It was an instant flashback into the 90s, running Irssi in screen over SSH on a slow dial-up connection while downloading MP3s. Happily chatting away.<p>Individual perceptions are weird.

Wow, it’s like a hyper-optimised Visual Studio+ReSharper installation.

I used to work at a company that gave our two machines: a <i>beefy</i> desktop with lots of RAM, many cores, two GPUs, a fast disk, etc., and a mid-range Apple laptop. For consistency reasons, my main development environment ended up being a tmux session running on the desktop, and I would ssh in to the machine from the laptop.<p>The latency hovered around 100ms (it&#x27;s not great), but it went up and down throughout the day and as I moved in and out of the office. Honestly, it isn&#x27;t so bad. I find after years of working like this I keep enough of a mental model of what I&#x27;ve typed that I&#x27;m not bothered by even the &quot;we&#x27;re done here&quot; setting.

I must be more patient than whoever wrote this. Only the last one or two options really bothered me at all. Maybe I just type slow.

I was able to notice it at the 30ms mark, and it gave me a flashback to trying out Eclipse and NetBeans when working on some big unfamiliar project years ago. Couldn&#x27;t make myself use either, no matter how useful all of the magic tools were...certainly in part because they both had noticeable input lag, which I&#x27;ve now learned I find super annoying.

Fun. But I don’t feel it’s entirely accurate. I don’t mind typing with a delay as I can watch my keyboard, but clicking on moving objects with a variable delay is quite dreadful.

Working in Ireland on computers that mostly live an AWS us-west-2 really makes you almost immune to this. ~150ms best case.<p>Of course, dialup was worse. You can never really get used to 300ms.

So fun story:<p>When I started using Ubuntu in 2008, I used gnome-terminal as was default, and had no issues for it for quite some time.<p>Around 2009-2010, I decided to start experimenting with a whole bunch of alternate window managers and terminals. Eventually settled on wmii and xterm.<p>Since then I&#x27;ve gotten so used to xterm, that I can sense the extra latency in gnome-terminal that isn&#x27;t in xterm, and it bothers me. This isn&#x27;t even over ssh or anything, just local.<p>Toying with this page, gnome-terminal feels about the same as 10ms. And apparently I can still just barely sense the delay at 5ms now. Somewhere below that, probably around 2ms, I can&#x27;t sense it anymore and it feels like xterm.

When I type it sometimes stalls for a while and then dumps a whole bunch of characters at once (much faster than I actually typed them). Anyone else having that issue?

I grew up connecting to 300bps BBS&#x27;, this is just water off a duck&#x27;s back for me!

Worth pointing that the number presented is presumably <i>additional</i> delay on top of the inherent delay of your setup. That means that especially in the lower end the values are not comparable between people on different systems.

I recently ran into the input delay problem when I foolishly installed a firmware update on my HP 608 G1 tablet. The firmware update introduced an unfixable bug that &quot;sleeps&quot; the touch panel if it hasn&#x27;t been used for a period of four seconds and introduces a full second of latency on the first tap thereafter. HP swapped units out while they were still in warranty but late adopters like me are SOL since no further firmware patches will be developed. I don&#x27;t know what my limit is but that surpasses it and my tablet sits collecting dust.

Eh, its not really that bad. The variable latency needs to be much more extreme to be noticeable. 250ms is about the threshold where I start to feel hampered. So going from 34ms-&gt;78ms-&gt;150ms-&gt;56ms-&gt;14ms really isn&#x27;t an issue. If I was seeing 100-200ms jumps, I think that would have a much bigger feedback effect, similar to to hearing your own voice on delay. Especially if it changes on a `space` rather than every character. Just long enough for you to get used to, and anticipate, the delay. Then a wild change.

Given that I&#x27;ve spent a lot of time developing remotely using Vim, 100ms feels pretty normal to me. After a bit, you develop a buffer in your head and you think in slightly larger chunks of text (a word or two or a short statement), and you express that and then review it for any fixes needed at that time. Error correcting is less immediate, but it&#x27;s not always a bad thing, as it lets you focus a bit more on what you are expressing instead of whether it&#x27;s got typos in it.

It would be interesting to study how annoyance with different settings changes based on your typing style. I touch type and was trained to be able to type without looking at the screen and none of them seem super annoying. However, I could see a touchscreen keyboard quickly becoming difficult to use since you can&#x27;t physically feel when you hit the wrong &quot;key&quot;.

Reminds me of operating servers via ssh when on 3g on a moving train.<p>(Yes, I know mosh exists for this reason)<p>It actually made me realise that my normal typing in my browser is quite high latency, since the 5-10ms exacerbated something enough to the point where I notice it even though there&#x27;s no added latency now.. one of those &quot;cannot unsee&quot; moments and it&#x27;s going to cause me to go insane.

This reminds me so much of macOS Finder. Back in 10.9 there was no delay when creating a new folder and typing a filename. This evening I accidentally caused Finder to navigate away from the &quot;untitled folder&quot; by starting to type the filename too quickly after pressing Command-N. It&#x27;s a really frustrating UX, and feels very similar to a 200+ ms delay.

This takes me back fifteen years to when I &quot;upgraded&quot; from a 1Mb&#x2F;s high-bandwidth cable internet service to a more expensive 128Kb&#x2F;s symmetric DSL connection because I was working from home over ssh. I went from &quot;really not great&quot; to &quot;fine&quot;&#x2F;&quot;could be worse&quot;, and it made my life so much better.

&gt; This project has received too many requests, please try again later.<p>Is it possible to describe what it is without spoiling anything?

Two things I would change:<p>1. The latency selector should be plain numbers, to avoid coloring the perception by the emotional terms used<p>2. Currently the letters appear with a delay, but the cursor advances immediately (could be my browser) - there is instant visual feedback, which probably reduces perceived latency

This is missing the particularly annoying &#x27;halts for 5 seconds then catches up&#x27; option.

I actually found myself getting motion sick at 50ms and above. I&#x27;m not sure why, I was a dialup kid from 300 baud on up for like 15 years.<p>I think something about the drawing is the issue.

When it finally loaded, I found it horrific fun. My sentiments lined up very closely with the labels: FINE, COULD BE WORSE, and then IT&#x27;S WORSE and worse.<p>The variable latency mode was truly annoying.

There&#x27;s been a lot of research done on latency in audio systems and how it impacts musical performance, so it&#x27;s probably worth cross-referencing this with those results.

Anything over 100ms is pretty much extremely annoying.<p>That being said, somehow the variable latency seems way less annoying than what it would be if averaged out and set that constant value.

300 baud tty input was like this. ah.. the memories (asr33 teletype in the house, followed by an olivetti, proceeded by a remote input cardpunch on 75baud)

&quot;This project has received too many requests, please try again later.&quot;<p>Can&#x27;t figure out if the site is down or if this is part of the test.

Given how often I remote into my iMac over a vpn that has both cellular and WiFi networks to deal with, none of these bothered me.

If you&#x27;ve ever administered a server via SSH over Tor, you&#x27;re forced to get used to this sort of stuff.

reminds me of administering an EC2 instance hosted in australia from a remote wimax connection in the rocky mountains.

I don&#x27;t find it annoying. I can just keep typing knowing everything is queued up.

If you think this is fun, try ssh through a 495ms latency satellite connection.

Reminds me of using Google Drive in Firefox :)

I can withstand them all.

Sort of badly coded. The cursor moves when it shouldn&#x27;t.