Keep walking

Sometimes improving performance is simply about keeping the user moving forward, not making it faster.

11 years ago I attended a DotJS conference in Paris. It was a long, sleep-deprived, trip on the Eurostar from London to Paris. I was there and back in less than 24 hours.

During the conference Guillermo Rauch, creator of Socket.io, Mongoose, and CEO of Vercel, gave an 18-minute talk titled “The need for speed”. And it changed how I think about software performance to this day.

The point he spent 18 minutes making was that what matters is not how fast something is—what matters is our perception of how fast it is. He told a story of Houston airport baggage claim, originally told by Steve Sounders of Google at Velocity conference in 2013. It went like this…

At Houston airport, passengers disembarking their flight would complain about how long they had to wait for their bags to appear at baggage claim. To anyone looking to improve the situation the obvious answer would be to look for opportunities to improve the performance of the baggage handlers or the broader process surrounding reuniting passengers with their bags. Their solution didn’t involve either of these things.

Their answer was to increase the distance passengers had to walk between their gate and baggage claim by 6 times. The complaints stopped.

Passengers overlooked any frustration at the distance they had to walk after leaving their flight. And any frustration they did feel was quickly replaced by delight once they got to baggage claim and their bags were waiting for them.

They kept the passenger moving forward, literally, and their perception of speed, at least as far as baggage claim goes, was one of excellent performance.

The lesson for software engineering is that the most effective way to improve performance isn’t always to make things faster, it may just be to alter the way speed is perceived. If we can keep users moving forward, even in small ways, it can alter their perception of how it feels to use the things we build.

Next time a user complains that baggage claim is slow, we need to think about ways to keep them moving.