4 Seconds Loading Time Is Maximum For Websurfers

nieske writes "Of course we all want webpages to load as fast as possible, but now research has finally shown it: four seconds loading time is the maximum threshold for websurfers. Akamai and JupiterResearch have conducted a study among 1,000 online shoppers and have found, among other results, that one third of respondents have, at one point, left a shopping website because of the overall 'poor experience.' 75% of them do not intend ever to come back to this website again. Online shopper loyalty also increases as loading time of webpages decreases. Will this study finally show developers of shopping websites the importance of the performance of their websites?"

Comments

tabs

[Kuciwalker]

It takes a lot longer than 4 seconds for a Slashdot story to load, particularly with the new AJAXy discussion system. I usually open up several things at a time in different tabs, which decreases the average loading time since I can read one thing while another loads. What browser were these people using?

Re:tabs

[From A Far Away Land]

There ought to be a lot more consideration given to dialup users this study finds. Bling might draw people back to the site, but only if it takes a second to load.

Re:tabs

[Ash Vince]

The thing to remember is that most of the rest of the world have better internet connections than the US do now so pages load quicker for us.

Here in the UK slashdot is near instantaneous over 24 Megabit ADSL. 2 Megabit ADSL accounts are given away for free in the UK now with most phone connections. The slowest account people actually pay money for is 8 Megabit ADSL.

As for all the people saying they still use dialup, why? Here you can get better net connections than 56kbit using a mobile phone (3G - UMTS).

To me the idea of waiting 4 seconds for a page to load is monsterous, expecially if the next page I clicked took just as long even though half the images were already cached.

Re:tabs

[maxwell demon]

I guess your employer denies you a browser with tabs in order to have you get at least some work done. :-)

Re:tabs

[Psiren]

Here in the UK slashdot is near instantaneous over 24 Megabit ADSL. 2 Megabit ADSL accounts are given away for free in the UK now with most phone connections. The slowest account people actually pay money for is 8 Megabit ADSL.

What?! What?!!!! If you're referring to the offers from people like Carphone Warehouse, it's far from free. Virtually everyone is still paying for their ADSL. And I'm paying for mine, which is currently running at 512K, because thats all the line supports. 8Mbit/s is just a dream until BT upgrade to their 21 Century Network (yeah, good luck with that). Maybe if you're living in London you have more options open to you, but the rest of the country is still far behind that.

And FYI, I'm on a 100mbit JANET connection and Slashdot is far from instantaneous. Personally, I think you're talking out of your arse.

Re:tabs

[init100]

It takes a lot longer than 4 seconds for a Slashdot story to load, particularly with the new AJAXy discussion system.

Slashdot does not use AJAX, just some Javascript, for the new discussion system. In essence, the only thing it does is hide all posts until you click on its header to expand it. The posts are there anyway, loaded along with the rest of the page. That way, it uses about the bandwith of the nested option, while presenting it as a dynamic threaded view. If they used AJAX, it would (probably) send an asynchronous query to the Slashdot servers asking for precisely the post you try to open. That does not happen, I checked tcpdump myself.

Had they really used AJAX, a comment thread might have been a lot quicker to load initially, but slightly slower loading each post.

Re:tabs

[compro01]

As for all the people saying they still use dialup, why?

because internet service in my area is practically a monopoly. the phone company refuses to run DSL-capable line the 3000 ft from the highway into the village and install the nessesary hardware. they're making buckets of cash off of raping us for our dial up ($60 a month for 180 hours/month of net time, plus the "unlimited long distance" required to be able to get that 180/month plan), not to mention the overage charges they pull if you go over the 180/month, wheras you can get the cheapie 1.5mbps DSL for $15/month in town.

the only other options in the area are wireless high speed (similar to Wi-max), but for that you need to buy the antenna and gear upfront ($250) and satalite internet, with is not an option as a. our satalite provider doesn't do internet and b. it would be useless in any case due to the lag from satalite (stupid laws of physics).

Re:tabs

[wgaryhas]

I guess you have never wanted to have the descriptions of several items up and compare them? In my experience, it is only linear when you are ready to pay; searching and comparing products benefits greatly from tabs.

Re:tabs

[NotTheNickIWanted]

You can't open several tabs at the same time, one to view the description of the item, one to add the item to your cart, one to fill the shipping address, one to fill the credit card information, etc.

Online shopping is a linear process and tabs can't help that.

I disagree.

I routinely use tabs while online shopping, most commonly to open product descriptions in a new tab will leaving a product index unmolested in another. Additionally I do not recall any of the sites from which I have made purchases getting confused if I open a new tab to view a product description, add that item to my "cart" from the extra tab, then close the tab and continue browsing from the previously loaded index page.

I agree that the checkout is in most cases a linear process, but examining items and selecting them for purchase does not have to be.

Well..

[Rob T Firefly]

Four-seconds-is-the-most-time-I-would-ever-spend-r eading-a-Slashdot-article-or-comment-so-I-ask-all- posters-to-please-make-their-points-quickly-and-su ccinctly-in-small-manageable-doses-ooh-look-there- is-a-shiny-object-on-my-desk-gotta-go.

Who is conducting that study?

[Anonymous Coward]

Note that Akamai has a vested interest in this study. They would like to encourage more businesses to use their technology so that their sites load faster.

I am not saying that the study is biased, but one should at least consider that it is in Akamai's best interest to convince every site owner that they will lose customers if their site is not fast enough.

Re:Who is conducting that study?

[SkunkPussy]

4s seems remarkably high!

I get frustrated by a delay of even 1s.

Re:Who is conducting that study?

[teh kurisu]

Exactly. I remember that the figure used to be 10s back in the days of dialup, but now that connections are faster we are getting more and more impatient.

What really annoys me are sites where the main text of the page seems to load last. Everything else, like image intensive navigation strips, logo headers, ads (if Camino's ad blocker hasn't caught them) etc. seems to slowly load first and then it's a couple of seconds before the main text appears.

Re:Who is conducting that study?

[Andrewkov]

That's nothing, I couldn't even read your whole post since it was too long.

Re:Who is conducting that study?

[Fozzyuw]

Note that Akamai has a vested interest in this study.

Agreed, also, I would say the old humorous adage of...

Statistics show that 70% of statistics are wrong.

I'd also think that this is more FUD, since of course people are going to say "I'll never return to that website because once it never loaded for me". Of course, if said website was Amazon.com, I'm going to go all in and say that they will most likely return and that they where just unhappy at the time.

Also, what where the survey questions? Where they worded to direct people to answer in a certain way? For example, where they written like this...Would you visit a website again if you had recurring bad experience with it?. Most experts agree that 4 seconds and more is a long time for a website to load and contribute this to a bad user experience. Would you agree?.

Finally, this is a bit of a moot point, but page load times are not always the fault of the web server. Case in point, my wireless router sucks (hey, I got it from best buy for like $20 after rebates, I'm not complaining) and it will often just drop the wireless signal. This makes it appear that when you try to access a website, when you where just accessing another website just fine, that the website takes a long time to load or more often than not, doesn't load at all, making you think there are issues with that site, when there is not.

I'd rather point out the obvious when it comes to the Internet... people expect to find broken sites. It's just the way everyone has grown up with the 'net. Crappy designed sites with stale content and broken links, multiple browsers (IE(win), IE(Mac) , Netscape/Mozilla, Safari) on multiple systems (Mac, Unix/Linux, Windows), security issues, internet issues with their ISP, web servers that go down, etc, etc, etc. People know that the nature of the Internet is volatile. Sure, they'll get angry and might never return if your site is a small 'mom and pop' shop, but when it comes to the 'major' sites such as CNN, MSN, Amazon, eBay, etc; then they will most likely return, even if it takes more than 4-seconds (which it does on CNN and if I remember right, they use Akamai).

Saying 4 second load time will make customers never return is slightly FUD (since it's subjective). Saying a customer won't return if they type their zip code into their address bar, and your site claims it's invalid (when it's not) will probably do the trick. That's something web developers can change. Load times isn't alway in their hands. But that's not to say they shouldn't review their code for efficiency in execution.

Cheers,
Fozzy

Great

[UbuntuDupe]

Now that this research is in, I predict that all website designers will realize the futility of flashy designs and instead remake their sites to be more like Craigslist or Google. I'm predicting an end to Flash and Javascript.[/naivete]

Re: Amazon.Com clearned this along time ago.

[trdrstv]

Amazon still codes their pages so they come up "fast" on a 28.8 modem. Ebay is the same. Where as some sites are sold by flashy experiances, they are not. They want to keep the barrier of entry low so you buy from them, and the whole process is fast and easy. To do otherwise is simply bad business.

Bullshit

[diegocgteleline.es]

I'm still on dialup, you insensitive clod! (really)

Only four seconds?

[BenoitRen]

Sounds to me like people are getting really impatient these days. I'm willing to wait up to 10 seconds to let a page load, and if it still hasn't, but is busy (instead of connecting again) I load another tab and occupy myself with something else.

However, four seconds sounds accurate for how long to wait until the page -starts- to load. If I have to wait longer than 4 seconds just to connect to a web server, I start to get impatient. If it takes much longer, I'll come back to it later and go do something else.

I call bullshit

[Deagol]

If the hyper-caffeinated, sugar-popping, MTV-watching, blipvert-desensitized ADD kids of today can tolerate the glacially loading site known as MySpace, I'd bet dollars to donuts that the slightly older, credit card-holding demographic of online shoppers gladly tolerate more than 4 seconds on we sites, and do so without much prejudice.

Either the summary is totally off, or this 'research' is total bunk.

Re:I call bullshit

[ScentCone]

I'd bet dollars to donuts that the slightly older, credit card-holding demographic of online shoppers gladly tolerate more than 4 seconds on we sites, and do so without much prejudice

I think it all comes down to what the site is doing, and how readily available another, virtually identical site (or range of merchandise, at similar prices, etc) actually is. The more sites there are that present and transact the same things in essentially the same way, the more that things like raw speed differentiate one from another. The more unique something is (niche merchandise, a blog with a particular perspective), the more patience people will have. Those things are nearly impossible to quantify, and thus you get largely BS, context-less reports like the one being discussed. I think that the larger conclusion ("people are less patient than they used to be") is valid - but pretty hard to nail down, in terms of specific seconds, for specific demographics, on particular platforms, across particular pipes, under certain seasonal circumstances, blah blah blah.

Akamai provides content acceleration services

[mattnuzum]

Of course Akamai is going to say that... they're business model revolves around bringing data closer to web surfers in order to speed up busy sites.

That's kind of like two years ago (or so) when RedHat released a whitepaper saying linux has a lower TCO while simultaneously Microsoft released a whitepaper saying windows server has a lower TCO.

The only difference is, there's no one out there selling a service or product that slows down website access to provide a contrasting viewpoint. Well, none except maybe these guys.

This survey was sponsored by...

[MagicM]

How convenient for Akamai. A survey done by them shows that webpages need to load faster or you could lose money. And you wouldn't want that, now would you?

About Akamai
Akamai® is the leading global service provider for accelerating content and business processes online. Thousands of organizations have formed trusted relationships with Akamai (...)

Disturbing...

[rasmusneckelmann]

One of the main reasons why I'm considering upgrading my 233-MHz laptop, is not because it's slow at doing heavy calculations (like Matlab, etc), but because it will soon to be impossible to surf the 'net. Not only are webpages growing larger and larger kB-wise, but they're also using increasingly more CPU resources when loading. Why is it necesary for my poor laptop to run at 100% CPU usage for a long time, just because I want to view a website? When gmail just came out it worked perfectly fast on my computer, but more and more javascript have been stuffed into it, so now it's almost useless for me. The tendency is same for many, many websites.

Poor Layout

[COMON$]

I think poor layout is more of the problem than loading times. In the late 90s and up to 2003 or so, websites were aweful from an artistic standpoint, but many sites have gotten better.

But for me the ability to sort through goods is the #1 priority. Yes I like to have a pretty site to look at but if I cannot find what I am looking for with a few simple queries then I am gone. Newegg is a fine example of a site where I can find what I want quickly. Tigerdirect is getting better. Dell is the worst. I have a theory that Dell is like many supermarkets, they rearrange stuff and make searching difficult so you see the maximum number of items before finding what you are actually looking for.

Web designers, if you want business, make it easy. I dont really think most people go to sites just to browse. Most of the time we are there with a purpose and as an ADD generation we want it quickly or we will move on.

It can't be that simple.

[artifex2004]

I just can't imagine that someone who is used to using, say, Amazon.com, is going to blink, much less suddenly switch to another vendor, if they have a 15 or 20 second page load every once in a while. Now, sure, if they did it all the time, I'd start to wonder. But since a site like Amazon trades on the fact that it's a central clearing point for a vast selection of inventory, there's a built-in barrier to trying someone else based on the assumption that they are less likely to have it. There may also be barriers to switching based on unfamiliarity with alternate vendors, etc., but previous experience, if not outright customer loyalty and perception of being able to deliver the goods, really drive retention a lot more than how fast you can always get that page up.

Now, whether Akamai is being disingenuous or something else... I really couldn't imagine :)

Flash? No thanks.

[Channard]

I'm on dial-up so I expect some long load times. However, if I get a flash webpage, I close it - I'm not messing about waiting an age for it to load. I'm not looking for some crappy 'multimedia experience' - I just want information, to buy something or whatever. I'm getting Broadband soon and I'll still be closing anything flash sites, no matter how fast they load. It's the web equivalent of powerpoint poisoning, and the worst thing is virtually every flash page I've seen hasn't been skippable.

Why I leave..

[nolife]

Wow, a web caching company has determined that customers abandon a site that is slow.

That is not an issue for me. My highest chance of leaving is determined by when in the buying process, the site provides total price including all shipping, handling, taxes, and acceptance of coupons codes. If they need my name and address I may leave depending on if they have a shipping link or general shipping info somewhere on the site that I can reference first. I will ALWAYS leave if they require CC or payment information before providing the total price or even a hint of shipping costs.
I guess they need my address prior to calculating shipping and handling charges if they do not have flat rates but a place to enter my just my zip code should be enough IMHO.

For a good example of providing a good experience is NewEgg. They includes the shipping costs right next to the product descriptions without even having to go to a cart first.

I view the delay or confusion of shipping and handling charges to be an attempt to hide a total cost or get you to get so far that they figure you will not back out. I will back out and take my business elesewhere.
Almost like the the Ebay sellers that charge $20 to ship a motherboard (at least they are up front about it though).

Ignores Parallel Processing

[Hillgiant]

Tabbed browsing largely negates this. It takes me more than 4 seconds to digest any given page, so even if I am looking at only one slow site, I can still flip back and forth between two tabs, reading the one while the other loads.

off-topic on "akamai"

[dreamyu]

This is totally off-topic here, but it's a small little detail anyway: Did you know that "akamai" is the hawaii. word for intelligent, clever?

Any web developers who didn't already know this

[Tetsugaku-San]

Don't deserve the title. I've been designing and developing websites since 1997 and I have ALWAYS worked to a maximum of 10 seconds for a page to download - even back in the day when everyone was on modems . People come to your site for a purpose, all the flashy crap designers love to put in is just a barrier between the user and that purpose.

I must be part of that statistic

[Centurix]

I'm here waiting for the thread to load up, click reply and decide to wri.. oooh, shiny thing!

Speaking of which....

[Toreo asesino]

Stats for http://slashdot.org/ -

Request Count: 78
Bytes Sent: 50.871
Bytes Received: 436.121

RESPONSE CODES
--------------
HTTP/200: 78

RESPONSE BYTES (by Content-Type)
--------------
          application/x-javascript: 288.162
application/x-shockwave-flash: 22.517
                                        text/html: 17.348
                                        image/png: 11.410
                                          ~headers: 21.942
                                          text/css: 37.599
                            text/javascript: 9.026
                                        image/gif: 28.117

That certainly takes longer than 4 seconds.

FlashBlock

[Midnight Thunder]

This is one tool I really find useful for Firefox:

https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/433/

If you can't stand flash, then its for you.

Speaking of AJAXian load times of favorite sites

[bberens]

Am I the only one who gets absolutely infuriated when it the g-mail on my google home page lags a second before coming up?

One thing I see a lot of developers do which really kills me is to actually load initial content with AJAX. This is the reason the Google home page is slow. Apparently other developers disagree with me, but I've always generated the initial load data server side on the original request and then used AJAX for updates only. AJAX shouldn't be generating your entire page layout from a call in the body onLoad.

Thanks,
bb

What the fuck are you talking about?

[Anonymous Coward]

What in the name of glorious fuck are you talking about? Microsoft was the original developer of XMLHttpRequest! IE has supported it longer than any other browser, include those put out by the Mozilla Project.

From the Wikipedia page about XMLHttpRequest:

The XMLHttpRequest concept was originally developed by Microsoft as part of Outlook Web Access 2000. The Microsoft implementation is called XMLHTTP and, as an ActiveX object, it differs from the published standard in a few small ways. It has been available since Internet Explorer 5.0 and is accessible via JScript, VBScript and other scripting languages supported by IE browsers.

The Mozilla project incorporated the first compatible native implementation of XMLHttpRequest in Mozilla 1.0 in 2002. This implementation was later followed by Apple since Safari 1.2, Konqueror, Opera Software since Opera 8.0 and iCab since 3.0b352.

I don't know what the fuck you're talking about, and I don't think you do, either. Of course Internet Explorer supports AJAX. If it didn't, serices like GMail wouldn't have even been created in the first place. You do realize that the vast majority of the people in the world use IE, right? You won't see a technology become as widespread as AJAX has become if Internet Explorer doesn't support it.

Re:What the fuck are you talking about?

[GoatMonkey2112]

That is true, but there is an easy workaround to get the exact same functionality from IE.
new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP");

Re:AJAX completely lacks performance.

[Bogtha]

AJAX suffers from some severe performance problems.

This is a nonsensical thing to say. It all depends on what you are doing. Ajax can significantly increase performance too. Remember when GMail was first launched? The #1 thing everybody said was that it was fast. Why? Because it used Ajax.

We looked into using several AJAX-based Web forum systems, from several different vendors. After trying them all, those of us who were working on the project were quite disappointed. The performance of the AJAX-based products was absolutely terrible.

Without mentioning what those systems were using Ajax for, there is zero useful information there. It's certainly possible that Ajax decreased performance in these cases, there's plenty of people throwing Ajax at things where it just isn't useful just because it's the buzzword du jour. On the other hand, there's also plenty of people using it as just another tool, and getting decent performance and usability improvements out of it.

In short: "Ajax completely lacks performance" == stupid. "Ajax harms performance when used to do [x], [y] or [z]" == useful information.

Re:AJAX completely lacks performance.

[AKAImBatman]

So, did it take 20 minutes to copy the file through that AJAX interface? (rolls eyes)

Friends, I would like you to meet the newest Slashdot troll. The "AJAX performance is terrible!" troll.

Unless, of course, you'd like to actually provide a few examples of these "AJAX-based Webforums" that suck so much?

Nielsen said it a long time ago

[rw712]

The (somewhat controversial) web-usability expert, Jakob Nielsen, has had much to say about response times. From his 1994 book, Usability Engineering, he states, "10 seconds is about the limit for keeping the user's attention focused on the dialogue." (reference: http://www.useit.com/papers/responsetime.html). You may have heard of him through his 2000 book, Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity. There has been a lot he has written that, in light of new methodologies, still makes good sense/practice.

Subject dependent surely?

[scotbot]

I bet the some people are happy to wait longer than 4 seconds for his favourite pr0n to download. This is slashdot after all.

No. It's registration

[gelfling]

Registration causes me to abandon online store sites. I have a credit card. We've been working out the bugs for 50 years. Credit card sales work pretty well already. I am not going to waste a lot of time registering for your damn website in order to qualify to spend my money with you. Sorry. If you really really really really really really want me to do your market research for you I demand a discount - maybe free shipping, which is my other pet peeve. It really doesn't cost $15 bucks to pick, pull and pack that widget. I'll trade a few seconds of load up time for that. Now get to work assholes. I'm the customer, not you.

Re: Amazon.Com clearned this along time ago.

[AnotherDaveB]

Amazon still codes their pages so they come up "fast" on a 28.8 modem. Ebay is the same.

Doesn't sound like the Amazon and Ebay sites I visit on my 56K modem.

I ran a little test using Safari's show page test load window option from the debug menu, results below.

• Amazon UK:
  • Total (load) time: 79.275 seconds
• Ebay UK:
  • Total (load) time: 17.54 seconds

This is the best reason to get AJAX

[DaitanGio]

This is the best argument for getting old web application and ajax-ize them, reducing load time and getting a better user experience.

Not developers

[Angst Badger]

Will this study finally show developers of shopping websites the importance of the performance of their websites?

Developers already know this. But at the end of the day, we're paid to implement the ill-considered plans of marketers and designers.

Run a squid proxy and cacheing nameserver

[Colin Smith]

Somewhere on your home LAN. Your web page latency will reduce substantially.

Bull is not far from the truth

[trianglman]

I downloaded and read the whitepaper that is linked from that article. The summary is an obvious skewing of the actual findings to focus on Akamai's business. A couple key examples are: "Which of the following factors are most influential in your decision to continue shopping with an online store where you have shopped in the past? (Select all that apply.)" - 65% said good navigation, page load time was 8th of 13 with only 40%. "Typically, how long are you willing to wait for a single Web page to load before leaving the Web site? (Select one.)" - 21% said 3 - 4 seconds, however 30% were willing to give the page 5 - 6 seconds (broadband numbers) and another 38% were willing to wait more than 6 seconds.

Re:AJAX completely lacks performance.

[inKubus]

It's pretty easy:

If you're application uses a lot of repeated screens and is really only a data-view and entry application, you should go AJAX. Because the slightly longer initial load time (to load ALL the interfacey stuff) is better than having to rerender the interface over HTML every time you change views.

If it's a step by step wizard type thing, or informational (think wikipedia) just get on with it using syncronous web pages.

Where AJAX fails is in the hands of inexperienced developers, where they won't allow the app to load almost everything before running. This is not always possible--something like google maps is a good example of this. You are going to have to load the maps as you go because there's too much data. However, google maps really relies on Images as data which is not the most efficient. They need to expand their client to render the maps itself from GIS info (obviously the satellite overlay will need to come from images).

Also, it fails when there is a high latency connection. However, a lot can be learned from past interfaces: feedback! Flash a div on the screen letting the user know it's loading, apply visibility:hidden when it's done. As long as the user knows that it's actually DOING SOMETHING and not just sitting there, they will give it the benefit of the doubt and wait. Test the connection latency at startup and then let the user know what you know. If you tell them in advance that they might experience poor performance because of their current connection, they are more likely to tolerate it.

Good interface design is a lot more than having it be fast. You have to keep the user informed of the current situation. It's not slowness that annoys people so much as not knowing what's going on. Early X windows had that problem for me also. Whereas in Windows when you click something the window immediately is created by GDI while the actual application loads, in X the appliation is started somewhere and then IT creates it's own window. So when you click on an Icon, it takes a few seconds of nothing (it seems) while we wait for the kernel to find on FS, allocate memory for and run the executable which does it's own init and then FINALLY pops up it's window. If you're running over a network connection, there's no disk noise to let you know anything is happening, so you are basically just sitting there wondering if you should click again. I don't know if it's still like this.

Anyway, my point is that there are a lot of tricks you can use to prevent user annoyance because it goes a lot further than some arbitrary time length.

Depends entirely on what...

[Kjella]

If I go to the front page of an online newspaper or similar site, I expect it to take long to load. If I click an article link, my patience is very thin because my target is simple article text, possibly with an illustration. Same with an online store. Also, there's a few tricks that lets the browser render it before it's loaded all the items - for example setting an image's height and width attributes. Not everyone has learned that yet. Also it depends on how much meaningful content there's on a page. If I have to visit a [break] new [break] page [break] for [break] every [break] sentence, I'm a lot less patient than if you just load it in one big honking page that I can scroll.

In short, measuring cost (time) without measuring benefit (content) is meaningless. If google's search page took four seconds to load, they'd be a dead duck. Other pages couldn't be rendered in four seconds with a Core 2 Quad and GigE, but are still highly successful. The pages you want to check is where the user asked you for something specific, in which case you'd better deliver ASAP without crapping up the page with everything he didn't ask for. Pages that are slow, I can live with. Pages that are slow, deliver little and waste time on meaningless stuff I don't.

Notice who sponsors the study

[melted]

Not to argue that nothing on the web should take more than 4 seconds to load (on _second_ load), but notice who sponsored the study - Akamai. It's like if Microsoft sponsored a study "proving" that Linux sucks.

Caching is your friend. If you cache, don't forget to version your stuff as well:

<script src="foo.js?d=md5sum-of-the-script"></script>

And do this with everything you cache - css, xml, xsl, whatever.

Answer to a survey vs. Real world action

[The_Crowder]

The danger of conducting surveys is that the answer to a question often times varies from what a user will really do in the real world.

Take the topic of "...the New Threshold for Acceptability..." as an example, the survey asks the question: "Typically, how long are you willing to wait for a single web page to load before leaving the site?" 31% of users said that they were willing to wait less than 5 seconds for a page to load before leaving. I am willing to bet that if you were to evaluate the metrics of online retailers you would find that the number of people leaving your site after a sub 5 second page load is less than 31%.

On a similar note, this survey fails to tell us whether this is something a user is willing to put up with only once or on every page load. It is my suspicion that a one time page load of 5 - 6 seconds is not going to cause "A full one-third of online shoppers with a broadband connection..." to abandoned the page; however, I would be willing to accept that if every page took 5 seconds or more to load on a broadband connection you would see a large amount of users abandoning the site.

Finally, I found it very interesting that the survey limited the answers to 6 possibilities (sub 1s, 1-2s, 3-4s, 5-6s, 6+). In my opinion, they made a big assumption in choosing 6s as the threshold of acceptability...where did that number come from/why was it chosen as the cap? I think the survey would have been able to benefit from having a higher range, perhaps to 10s as suggested by Jakob Nielsen (http://www.useit.com/papers/responsetime.html)