RAIL is a model for breaking down a user’s experience into key actions. – RAIL/Response, Animation, Idle, Page Load
Human-computer interaction studies have a long history. In Jakob Nielsen’s work on response time limits, three thresholds are suggested:
- 100 milliseconds is about the limit for having the user feel that the system is reacting instantaneously, meaning that no special feedback is necessary except to display the result.
- 1.0 second is about the limit for the user’s flow of thought to stay uninterrupted, even though the user will notice the delay. Normally, no special feedback is necessary during delays of more than 0.1 but less than 1.0 second, but the user does lose the feeling of operating directly on the data.
- 10 seconds is about the limit for keeping the user’s attention focused on the dialogue. For longer delays, users will want to perform other tasks while waiting for the computer to finish, so they should be given feedback indicating when the computer expects to be done. Feedback during the delay is especially important if the response time is likely to be highly variable, since users will then not know what to expect.
Based on this, with today’s improved machine performance, RAIL added one more point:
- 0 to 16 ms: Users are exceptionally good at tracking motion, and they dislike it when animations aren’t smooth. They perceive animations as smooth so long as 60 new frames are rendered every second. That’s 16 ms per frame, including the time it takes for the browser to paint the new frame to the screen, leaving an app about 10 ms to produce a frame.
