On Tue, May 21, 2013 at 6:37 PM, tim Rowledge <tim at rowledge.org> wrote:

> As a simple first stage I'd like to suggest that buttony/list-item-ish widgets ought to do two-stage highlighting by perhaps drawing an outline highlight immediately the click/press is detected and then doing the full highlight when the action is complete. Just that, hopefully simple, change would improve the user experience a great deal.

As a student and practitioner of Ward Cunningham's approach to UI
design (and XP development), I wholeheardtedly agree with Tim.  I was
fortunate to meet Ward in 1994 and to have one of his colleagues as my
mentor.  In his paper, "The CHECKS Pattern Language of Information
Integrity" Ward advocates a non-intrusive, non-modal UI style.  I
highly recommend reading it if you're interested in making
user-interfaces that interact appropriately with people.

Above, Tim is proposing we "Echo Back" confirmation of user-input:

   http://c2.com/ppr/checks.html#4

I'd bet it wouldn't be difficult to do -- we know we can draw a
1-pixel border around any rectangle, and whatever action is performed
on mouseClick (or on mouseDown vs. mouseUp) said border could be
drawn, then the action, THEN the highlight.  Sounds good!