A psychological investigation of long retrieval times on the World Wide Web

With the increasingly rapid uptake of the World Wide Web, even those pages classed as ‘the best of the web’ are not immune to large download latencies. This paper investigates whether the latency between requesting a page and receiving it influence user perceptions of the page. The paper describes a...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Interacting with computers 1998-03, Vol.10 (1), p.77-86
Main Authors: Ramsay, Judith, Barbesi, Alessandro, Preece, Jenny
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Delays
Information retrieval
Online information retrieval
Psychological aspects
Response time
Searching
Subjective satisfaction
Usability
World Wide Web
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Summary:With the increasingly rapid uptake of the World Wide Web, even those pages classed as ‘the best of the web’ are not immune to large download latencies. This paper investigates whether the latency between requesting a page and receiving it influence user perceptions of the page. The paper describes a study in which users are presented with seven different web pages with delays ranging from 2 s to 2 min, and are then asked to rate the pages on a number of criteria. Predetermined delays were injected into the page loading process. Pages which were retrieved faster were judged significantly more interesting than their slower counterparts. The implications for web page design are discussed.
ISSN:0953-5438
1873-7951
DOI:10.1016/S0953-5438(97)00019-2