Faster walkthroughs, mostly by deleting things

When a demo agent shows your product it is driving a real browser: clicking, scrolling, reading the page and narrating all at once. It was also, we discovered, spending a good deal of that time waiting for pages that had already finished loading. We put a stopwatch on every step and removed the pauses that were not doing anything for anybody.

• Less silence between steps. The quiet stretches while the agent works are down by about half in our test walkthroughs.
• Quicker clicks. The agent is now more intelligent about figuring out when a page has finished reacting to a click. Same choreography on screen with considerably less standing around.
• A straighter cursor. On its way to whatever it was about to click, the pointer used to stop off in the middle of the page first. It goes directly now.
• Fewer very long pauses. When a page reshuffles itself mid-click, which inboxes and conversation lists do constantly, the agent notices and takes a fresh look. It used to wait thirty seconds for an element that had ceased to exist. Thirty seconds is the browser's default level of patience, and about twenty-nine more than ours.
• Demos start sooner. The opening hello no longer queues behind setup work that could quite happily have happened alongside it.