I am interested in opinions on what is acceptable from a user standpoint in web page loads. I talking about home fronts mostly as I am aware of the "it depends" factor related to what the user is doing. Is there a target number that big sites like CNN or espn strive for?
Also, what factor does perception play in load times? Letting the user see some of the content while the rest of it is loading seems like a good strategy but what are its downsides?
Five seconds and I'm gone.
I particularly hate websites that load most of the content, but then one particular piece takes a looooooooong time to load. Usually its BS that has nothing to do with the content; like a site meter.
Under a half second is Google's Standard.
Also according to Yahoo's studies perception does play a huge perception. If you can deliver the HTML in under a half second but it takes 10 seconds to download all the other assets for the page. Then your load time is 10.5 seconds.
One rule of thumb is that you have 7 seconds to sell a prospect that they have reached a page of interest to them. You don't have to make a sale in 7 seconds, you just have 7 seconds to keep them for a while longer.
Here is the skinny, if your initial page takes 6 seconds to load, you have 1 second of selling time. If your initial page takes 1 second or less to load you have 6-7 seconds of selling time.
I'm a hard user which I think makes me a better developer.
I expect to see things are happening immediately and then expect progress each and every second. If I have to look at something I can't read for more than a few seconds I hit the back button and take a look at the next hit on Google.
I used to have lots of research to hand on this kind of metric that Jacob Nielson posted in the early 2000's but I think in these days of broadband people are getting even tougher on slow loading sites and more and more act like me and hit the back button quickly.
I believe less than 2 seconds. I don't remember where, but I do remember many years ago there was a study about interactive applications and 2 seconds was the threshold. If it's longer than 2 seconds than it isn't interactive.
I think it's better to start showing content right away, but if it still takes a long time for the page to finish loading it is just as bad. You might get by with it taking a second or two longer.
Own my own personal web site is now in the 5 to 6 second range for dynamic web pages, which is unacceptable, and I guess I need to look for a new host.
At the goodle I/O confrence this year there was a lot of talk about it. Google's standard is very low especially for their search page. I listened to an interview with the web master for the uk guardian and there standard was around a second as well.
Perception is king in this arena. It's all about distracting the user while you do things behind the scenes. Look at the windows file transfer. The "transfer complete" percentage bar people see while windows is moving files is deliberately a little misleading to give the "feel" that it is actually taking less time than it is. It is this fact that most people think that XP copies files faster than Vista when, in truth, this is not necessarily the case. In Vista they changed how the completion percentage bar functions and people suddenly perceived that it is running slower. There is an article on this floating around somewhere but I lost the link or i'd provide it. The human brain can only actively focus on one thing at a time, so if you distract users into watching something else, they will forget about how long it takes the site to load.
Put it this way... if I have time to check my watch, then its too long.
It's all about distracting the user while you do things behind the scenes.
This is something that I would agree with. If you distract the user like the pre-load screens in Flash apps, then they'll be too busy to notice all the facy web pages being loaded.
According to Nielsen on Response Time Overview response time should be in a order of :
As said your average response time needs to be in the [0.1 - 10[ bracket.
Jakob Nielsen has studied the matter extensively.
1.0 second is about the limit for the user's flow of thought to stay uninterrupted, even though the user will notice the delay. Normally, no special feedback is necessary during delays of more than 0.1 but less than 1.0 second, but the user does lose the feeling of operating directly on the data.
10 seconds is about the limit for keeping the user's attention focused on the dialogue. For longer delays, users will want to perform other tasks while waiting for the computer to finish, so they should be given feedback indicating when the computer expects to be done. Feedback during the delay is especially important if the response time is likely to be highly variable, since users will then not know what to expect.
User perception strategy of building your pages does have one huge downside. For example, we use an external analytics tool that is served with client side javascript. If we give our users back some content and they find what they are looking for they are gone. If that script hasn't fired then that visit is never recorded.
Depends on the site. If it's a site I'm visiting incidentally, and for the first time (for example, as one of 20 or so search results), they've got about five seconds to impress me, and then I'm leaving.
Sites that I visit regularly I give a lot more slack. I'll even wait up to 30 seconds for loading to finish. Ditto for sites I don't frequent, but I may really want the information from.