doherty-threshold

doherty-threshold is a skill for Claude Code from Owl-Listener/designer-skills. It costs 51 tokens per session (802 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide to keeping interfaces responsive by treating 400 milliseconds as an important limit for immediate-feeling interactions.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when diagnosing slow interactions or setting response-time targets for an application.
Why use it?
It helps identify delays that interrupt a person's flow and decide when the interface needs visible waiting feedback.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the interaction-design plugin — 22 skills, 5 commands shipped together

not rated 2.6krepo +91 4d ago A scan Socket: passSnyk: passSkillSpector: pass 51 tokens original MIT

Good fit Use it when diagnosing slow interactions or setting response-time targets for an application.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/owl-listener/designer-skills/doherty-threshold
About the project

Owl-Listener/designer-skills is a collection of AI-agent skills, commands, and plugins for design work, covering research, design systems, interfaces, interaction, and delivery. Designers and developers use it inside coding assistants to guide design tasks, and the catalogue entries represent selected parts of that larger collection.

Owl-Listener/designer-skills · 2,593 stars · on GitHub

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add Owl-Listener/designer-skills --skill doherty-threshold
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Owl-Listener/designer-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install interaction-design, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 22 skills, 5 commands.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for doherty-threshold

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/owl-listener/designer-skills/doherty-threshold/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/owl-listener/designer-skills/doherty-threshold)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/owl-listener/designer-skills/doherty-threshold"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/owl-listener/designer-skills/doherty-threshold/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for doherty-threshold

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/owl-listener/designer-skills/doherty-threshold"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/owl-listener/designer-skills/doherty-threshold.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 51 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 802 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • Socket pass 6 May 2026
  • Snyk pass 6 May 2026
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026
How audits are shown
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00051 $0.00802
Opus 5 $0.00026 $0.00401
Sonnet 5 $0.00010 $0.00160
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00080

Measured 6d ago against content hash 873404019ba7, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-10, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

doherty-threshold scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 6d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

Origin

Copies of this mod

1 near-identical copy found in the catalogue:

interaction-design/skills/doherty-threshold/SKILL.md · 44 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 44 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Doherty Threshold

You are an expert in perceived performance and the design of responsive, flow-preserving interfaces.

What You Do

You apply the Doherty Threshold to identify where response latency breaks user flow, and design feedback patterns and technical targets to keep interactions feeling immediate.

The Principle

Walter Doherty and Ahrvind Thadani (IBM, 1982) established that when a computer responds to a user action in under 400ms, productivity increases substantially — users stay in flow rather than losing their train of thought or shifting attention. Above this threshold, users notice the wait and their cognitive engagement with the task degrades. The key thresholds:

Response time User perception
0–100ms Instant — the system feels like a direct extension of the action
100–300ms Fast — perceptible but not disruptive
300–400ms Approaching the boundary — some users notice
400ms–1s Slow — users are aware of waiting; a response indicator is needed
1s+ Definitely slow — progress feedback required; flow is broken
10s+ Task-level disruption — users switch context

Design Applications

Where Sub-400ms Matters Most

  • Slide and view transitions: switching between screens or slides should complete in under 400ms; beyond this, the transition itself becomes a wait
  • Inline interactions: toggles, checkboxes, dropdowns, tab switches — all should feel immediate
  • Search and filter: results should begin appearing before 400ms; if not, show a skeleton or spinner immediately
  • Autocomplete: first suggestions should appear within 300ms of typing
  • Button feedback: visual state change on press must happen within 100ms, regardless of whether the underlying action completes

When You Cannot Meet the Threshold

If the system genuinely cannot respond in under 400ms:

  1. Acknowledge immediately (within 100ms) with a visual state change on the triggering element
  2. Show a loading indicator if completion will take 400ms–3s
  3. Show progress (not just a spinner) if completion will take more than 3s
  4. Optimistic UI: update the interface immediately, reconcile with the server response when it arrives
  5. Skeleton screens: preferred over spinners for content that has a known layout — they maintain spatial context and feel faster

Read the full file on GitHub · 44 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 6d ago First seen · 44 lines · 51 tokens per session scan A 873404019ba7

Subscribe to this mod's changes

doherty-threshold is a skill published in the GitHub repository Owl-Listener/designer-skills (2,593 stars, last pushed 4d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 51 tokens to every session and 802 once invoked, about $0.0003 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-09-03.

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