How can I improve the subjective speed of my application?

Question

Today my co-worker noticed that when adding a decimal place to a progress indicator leads to the impression that the program is running faster than without. (i.e. instead of 1,2

Answer 1

Here is an article about "Expressing time in your UI" and user perception of time. I do not know if it is exactly what you expect as an answer, but it is definitely worth the read.

Answer 2

Showing details (such as the names of files being copied in an installation process) can often make things seem like they're going faster because there's constant, noticeable activity (as opposed to a slowly-creeping progress bar).

If your algorithm is such that it generates a list of results, and you have some way of displaying results as they're generated (as opposed to all at once at the end), do so - the sooner the user has something else to look at besides a spinner, the better.