Flickr’s optimistic committing

Somewhere next to optimistic loading and optimistic saving exists another technique to make apps feel faster: optimistic committing. Flickr is a great example. After navigating to photo upload, you enter a sort of a foyer where you can drag in the photos, reorder them, name and tag them, and otherwise prepare them before pressing the big Upload button. But Flickr also optimistically assumes you will press that button, and slowly starts uploading the heavy photos in the background the moment you drag them in. Like all optimistic schemes, being friendlier toward the user complicates things for Flickr’s designers and engineers. After all, there is still a regular upload modal after you do commit to the upload… …so the two states – quiet staging area upload, and the official visible upload – have to be reconciled and kept in sync. Also, optimistic but eventually cancelled uploads have to be cleaned up from the servers. Lastly, there’s signposting. Contrary to lighter optimistic loading…