Web Site Delays: How Tolerant are Users?

Abstract

Web page loading speed continues to vex users, even as broadband adoption increases. Several studies have addressed delays in the context of Web sites as well as interactive corporate systems, and have recommended a wide range of "rules of thumb." Some studies conclude that response times should be no greater than 2 seconds while other studies caution on delays of 12 seconds or more. One of the strongest conclusions was that complex tasks seemed to allow longer response times. This study examined delay times of 0, 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, and 12 seconds using 196 undergraduate students in an experiment. Randomly assigned a constant delay time, subjects were asked to complete 9 search tasks, exploring a familiar and an unfamiliar site. Plots of the dependent * Izak Benbasat and Ping Zhang were the accepting senior editors for this paper; Suzanne Rivard, Fiona Nah and Jonathan Palmer were blind reviewers. This paper is one of the special theme papers on Human-Computer Interaction Research in MIS. An early version of the paper was accepted and presented at the first annual pre-ICIS workshop on HCI Research in MIS,

Stuck in traffic

“…A five second delay was guided by the literature as a reasonable value to stimulate a change in user behaviour. Studies have shown that even a small increase in query response delay can impact user behaviour [6,30], while 'acceptable' delay times for document downloading ranged from three to ten seconds [10], with work by Galletta et al [15] showing that a document download delay higher than four seconds can lead to a change in behavioural attitudes towards a webpage.…”

“…These delays have been shown as a source of major frustration to users [7]. Indeed, several studies have examined the e↵ect of page loading delays in the context of browsing the web [15,25]. It has been shown that the longer a page takes to load, the less favourably users see that page when it finally appears [28].…”

“…Since the late 1990s, a number of studies have demonstrated that network latency and download speeds can impact how users interact with webpages, as well as their perceived usefulness [10,15,18,25,28]. These delays are often cited as a complaint by the users of websites [33].…”

“…These delays are often cited as a complaint by the users of websites [33]. For example, Galletta et al [15] examined how the behaviour of users changed when faced with page load delays of 0, 2, 4, 6, 8, 10 and 12 seconds. Their results suggest that user performance and behavioural intentions dropped once delays exceeded 2-4 seconds, consistent with Miller's two second rule [24].…”

A Cost-Sensitive Adaptation Engine for Server Consolidation of Multitier Applications

“…The sharing of resources by such applications owned by multiple customers raises new resource allocation challenges such as ensuring responsiveness under dynamically changing workloads and isolating them from demand fluctuations in co-located virtual machines (VMs). However, despite the well-documented importance of responsiveness to end users [1,2,3], cloud services today typically only address availability guarantees and not response-time-based service level agreements (SLAs).…”