Comments on: Usability Tools Podcast: The Truth About Page Download Time

By: Czas ładowania się strony « O użyteczności zwanej też usability

Czas ładowania się strony « O użyteczności zwanej też usability — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 23:35:26 +0000

[...] Więcej w The Truth About Page Download Time [...]

By: Download Time and E-Learning » UIE Brain Sparks

Download Time and E-Learning » UIE Brain Sparks — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 23:19:43 +0000

[...] wrote: I just listened to your podcast: Usability Tools Podcast: The Truth About Page Download Time. Can you express your thoughts on download time and usability as it applies to e-learning modules [...]

By: StanShinn.com | The Truth About Page Download Time

StanShinn.com | The Truth About Page Download Time — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 18:53:55 +0000

[...] A study has shown a site’s download time doesn’t seem to impact on a site’s usability. Instead, sites that are easy to use, fun and professional are perceived as being fast. Apparently, people perceive time to take longer when they are in pain. Source [...]

By: Mendy Ouzillou

Mendy Ouzillou — Sat, 06 Oct 2007 15:37:59 +0000

Very interesting podcast. Like anything though I think there is a balance between focusing on useability and download time. I see many sites that have really long download times because the images have not been compressed properly to a manageable size. Also, I think people tend to focus on download time because that is an easily measurable metric. Useability, as important as it is, is difficult to properly quantify. So … are there any tools that would help me mimic how people experience my glass art jewelry site (lots of images) on a 56k modem? Also, I’d like to see the order in which my content downloads. Any tool for that?

By: Torrential Web Dev

Torrential Web Dev — Sat, 29 Sep 2007 15:30:48 +0000

Benchmarks, Site Speed and User Experience…

Following on the back of my recent posts looking at the (hopefully) best and worst of benchmarks I thought it would be useful to finish off with some genuine tips for creating ‘lightning fast’ websites. I probably lack the experience and insight to …

By: Tom Philo

Tom Philo — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 00:06:32 +0000

Complete page load times is not the same as the time to start showing something useful to the user.
The incremental loading of items - including secondary menu graphics and lots of items below the fold, or high res graphics loading after all the text has been loaded, change the perceptions of how fast a page loads. This is where a good designer along with a good technical programmer of web pages can fool the person into thinking a page is faster than what is is by just giving the user something to start scanning (and if they are really interested reading) on the page.

When everyone was using dyamically sizing tables to layout pages with unsized graphics that was the worse - eveything had to come down before anything was seen due to the way tables are designed to be rendered by the browser.

Most sites now-a-days will ensure that text is rendered (delivered) first with graphics coming down last into a predefined sized zone with defined placement so the browser does not have to figure out where to put it on the fly - but is told where to put it and thus save time.

Course not all rules are to be followed - I have some hugh photos on my site so page load is going to be slow - but the people want to see the photos (else the words have no context when comparing aircraft, parts of castles, flowers, people etc) so you ensure that by the time they can read the text the graphics are there.

By: Steve Fisher

Steve Fisher — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 21:14:12 +0000

Alexander brought up the point that I was wondering. I’ve seen a number of sites that get slowed up because they are downloading banner ads and the like first, which can greatly lengthen the amount of time it takes for the actual content to show up. I see those sites as slow, but would be curious to see the time differences with those sites and sites as I judge as normal or fast loading.

By: User First Web » links for 2007-09-25

User First Web » links for 2007-09-25 — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 07:27:49 +0000

[...] Usability Tools Podcast: The Truth About Page Download Time » UIE Brain Sparks (tags: usability speedupyoursite) [...]

By: User First Web » Speed of Site and Usability

User First Web » Speed of Site and Usability — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 06:49:14 +0000

[...] and Christine Perfetti discuss a study on how web page speed impacts usability on their latest Usability Tools Podcast. Because this study conflicts with some of the research that I cited during my recent presentation [...]

By: Jared Spool

Jared Spool — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 22:10:30 +0000

Alexander, great question.

We don’t have to ask the interns to re-watch the video because they got those numbers already on the first pass. (I just didn’t mention it in the podcast.)

Turns out About.com loaded in a single burst, coming in on average at 8 seconds per page.

Amazon, as you suspected, loaded incrementally, with the first page full loading long before the 34 seconds it took to load the average page.

But here’s the kicker: the first screenful on Amazon took 11 seconds to load. It was still 3 seconds slower than the entire page for About.com. Yet, users consistently rated Amazon to be much faster than About.com.

By: Alexander

Alexander — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 18:59:30 +0000

Measuring the time that the Netscape logo throbs may be misleading if a page is presenting you interesting content even though it has not completely downloaded. I wonder: if the interns went back through the hours of video (ha ha!) to time how long it took for some meaningful content to appear on the page… (rather than how long the Netscape logo spun). Do you think it would show any differences?

By: Peter Van Dijck’s Guide to Ease » Blog Archive

Peter Van Dijck’s Guide to Ease » Blog Archive — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 17:18:06 +0000

[...] Users rate some sites consistently slow and other sites consistently fast. For example, About.com is rated slow. But when looking at the data, the sites that were rated slow weren’t all really slow. Amazon is rated as fast, and it isn’t really that fast (fast enough, but not crazy fast). So why do users feel some sites are slow or fast? (About.com loaded faster than Amazon.com in the test, yet was perceived as very slow.) [...]