Response Times: Digesting the Latest Information
Returning to the discussion around my post How Response Times Impact Business? and recent publications about the topic, like For Impatient Web Users, an Eye Blink Is Just Too Long to Wait.
From one side, we see more and more statement the response times should be shorter and shorter. For example, both Scott Barber and Harry Shum (“a computer scientist and speed specialist at Microsoft” according to the New York Times article) state 250 milliseconds as the magic number for response times (although I am not sure where these 250 milliseconds came from).
From another side, the three psychological thresholds and other considerations I referred to in my post were based on multiple researches and definitely make sense.
Well, I definitely prefer to see a recent research about the subject. It is strange that there were a lot of research since 1968 – but none recent. And it is when really big money gets involved. Or there are some, but they just don’t get released?
Meanwhile one explanation may be that perception about [at least] simple web navigation is changing. Web response times were defined by the second threshold: users feel they are interacting freely with the information (1-5 seconds). They notice the delay, but feel that the computer is “working” on the command. Well, maybe users don’t feel anymore that the computer should “work” [at least] for simple web navigation. Maybe they now perceive it as described by the first threshold: instantaneous (0.1-0.2 second). Users feel that they directly manipulate objects in the user interface. So while these psychological thresholds are still correct, perception of [at least] simple web navigation is changing and it gets defined by another threshold. Just a speculation, of course – it would be interesting to see any research to prove or disprove it.
In a similar classification, Steven Seow in Designing and Engineering Time: The Psychology of Time Perception in Software defines four classes of responsiveness bases on user expectancy:
- Instantaneous: 0.1 to 0.2 seconds
- Immediate: 0.5 to one second
- Continuous: two to five seconds
- Captive: seven to ten seconds
So in a way he breaks the middle threshold into two classes: immediate and continues. If accept this division, we perhaps may say that user expectations for [at least] for simple web navigation are moving from continuous class to immediate class. That maybe makes more sense for me: I am still rather skeptical that we indeed need 250 ms end-user response time (of course, if we talk about server response time, it would be another story).
