[thelist] maximum page load for users leave?

[Wade Armstrong]

on 12/4/02 11:28 AM, Chris W. Parker at cparker at swatgear.com wrote:

>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Nick Wilson [mailto:nick at tioka.com]
>> Sent: Wednesday, December 04, 2002 11:21 AM
>> To: thelist
>> Subject: [thelist] maximum page load for users leave?
>>
>> Are there any recent studies/stats on how many seconds a user
>> will wait
>> for a page to load before giving up on the site?
>
> try http://www.useit.com/
>
>> I've always worked to the 'under 8secs' rule but I'd really
>> like to see
>> some propter research/stats on this....
>
> i think some people (jakob nielsen may be one) say even 1 second is too
> long. 8 seconds seems to me to be a really generous wait time.

Nielsen proposed his rule of thumb for download times a while ago. More
recent research by Jared Spool and Christine Perfetti at UIE suggests that,
while quicker is better, users' subjective reporting of how long a page
takes to download is only lightly correlated with how long the page actually
takes to download, and is much more highly correlated with how successful
the user is at accomplishing their goals with the site. You can read a brief
intro to the research at http://www.uie.com/truth.htm. While the full study
behind this is not available for free, a lot more details are available by
searching the CHI-WEB listserv archives at
http://www.acm.org/archives/chi-web.html for "download time."

Wade