Busy — Tue, 07 Feb 2006 19:46:02 +0000

Start your own study

As Megan said people are usually looking for an answer and tab browsing allows mutli pages open at once from search results so load time doesn't really matter as you just read first one that loads. Lots of sites use bad background/text colour combinations so you have to actually highlite the content to read it, and even put up with the animations, flash and other crap people use, but if you want the info you'll do it.

robfenn — Tue, 07 Feb 2006 17:27:58 +0000

I think i might start my own study!

demonhale — Tue, 07 Feb 2006 17:21:49 +0000

I think its not the main concern, I consider loading time of a site as a prime suspect... How fast you can give me the info I am looking for in the users point of view is the main factor...

Megan — Tue, 07 Feb 2006 14:29:44 +0000

Note that that study was just looking at how long people took to make a decision about whether they liked the *appearance* of the site. It didn't measure anything about the qaulity of the site or whether they would say around. I saw some of the sites they were testing and most of the "good" ones were very image intensive. So they were basiclaly looking at pretty pictures.

The author did say some things about how people would take that short a time to decide if they wanted to stay or not, but that was not measured in the study. I think that the actual time taken to decide if you're going to stay on a site varies a lot depending on the circumstances. When people arrive at a site they're basically looking for the answer to a question: Is this what I want? In some cases you might know right away, but in most cases you're probably going to look around and read some to find that out.

robfenn — Tue, 07 Feb 2006 11:04:27 +0000

Thanks Megan.

Megan — Mon, 06 Feb 2006 21:52:53 +0000

That's the second link I've messed up lately! Here it is:

http://www.webmaster-forums.net/showthread.php?t=32584

I sort of suspect that sometimes people make those numbers up...

robfenn — Mon, 06 Feb 2006 21:11:22 +0000

For some reason that link takes me to Microsoft!

Looking on Google, people are clearly undecided about the amount of time it is...

Megan — Mon, 06 Feb 2006 20:41:06 +0000

I've been hearing this sort of thing for a very long - basically since I started in web design. I can't seem to find any real documentation, except for inumerable links to the article discussed [url='http://www.webmaster-forums.net/showthread.php?t=32584"]here[/url], which has gotten way out of control.

Busy — Mon, 06 Feb 2006 20:13:22 +0000

Different articles say different lengths, I think the average is 11 seconds. Have always read the first 25 words can have the same effect (think that includes banners, logos and ads)