Hiding information behind artificial loading times does not inspire confidence in the product. Consider which sort of person you are trying to convince and try to imagine what they would want, in this case I definitely think your audience would appreciate not waiting for "Simple. Fast. Elegant."
Lengthy load times are detrimental to UX. Just look at how people are increasingly less likely to wait for a page to finish loading with every additional second it takes to load [1, 2].
In regards to feedback from users, this is especially true when finding product-market-fit (when an idea actually becomes a business). There’s nothing better than learning what customers who actually use your product want in future releases/improvements. It’s a case of building based off actual demand versus based off a hypothetical in one’s mind (a very common “failing”, i.e. learning experience, for first-time founders). Only when your product grows to the point of attracting potential customers outside your target demographic should you not place tremendous value on every single piece of feedback.
The article isn't clear on it, but there have been studies (http://baymard.com/blog/making-a-slow-site-appear-fast) that show the perception of fast loading is actually more important than the real thing. Showing the user a "Loading..." graphic is the most common manifestation of this, but there are others. (Unfortunately, the original Forrester-Akamai study seems to be unavailable.)
Im with you, although we will see if animations can hide loading times.
Btw, you will always have people that disagree with you. I get crap about the loading time of my website, but since I changed to a massive beautiful change, my conversion doubled overnight.
I think a human can decide for themselves if something takes too long. I ran into this issue and optimized, but I wouldnt be chasing benchmarks.
Loading a webpage that is considered "lightning fast" - 1 second
Of course the common opinion expressed here is people couldn't care less for those numbers - it's hard to get them to care that the website they are working on can't finish rendering in the time it takes anyone to pour a cup of coffee.
Irrespective of his concerns as an individual- from a pure usability perspective: any waiting of any sort that does not signify some valuable piece of information is negative to user experience. We have seen time and time again that web speed optimizations show significant positive change in how people use or abandon different web tasks.
There may be some abhorrent business perspective that uses this loading time as a "this app is so complicated it takes minutes to load" type thinking- but this is pure snake oil. Ultimately being able to use a tool as soon as the need strikes and at a speed as close to your own thoughts as possible is the best user experience. Any decisions that are made (8 minute load time) based on technology contraints tend to impact user experience negatively.
- Users are not the customers, so there's little point in optimizing for their experience, except to the extent that it impacts the number of users your customers reach with ads.
- Users do not favor faster websites, so as long as you meat a minimum performance bar so they don't leave before the ads load, there's little to gain from optimizing the speed.
- For users that do care about load-time, it's hard to know before visiting a page whether it's fast or not, and by that point the publisher has already been paid to show you the ads.
A helpful solution would be to show the load time as a hover-over above links, so that you can decide not to visit pages with long load times.
Isn't the point of dynamically loading content to reduce the perceived waiting time though? I wonder if focus on cleanly showing the user the page is rendering might be better placed on getting content to load faster instead.
Page load times have a meaningful impact on sales.
> The survey from Digital.com asked 1,250 online shoppers how long they typically wait for web pages to load before abandoning a website and their intended purchases.
> Fifty-three percent expect the page to load in three seconds or less, and 21% say slow-loading pages are their biggest gripe when shopping online. Half will simply abandon their shopping carts if pages don’t load fast enough, the report said.
Loading time doesn't always result in complaints (that depends on the user's expectations) but has a significant effect on likelihood of repeat visits, length of visits, and amount of interaction.
Yeah I am confused about this too, 10 seconds sounds like a big exaggeration. Your site should load in 1-2 seconds and the marketing can come the third second. However the page should already be interactive after the first 2 seconds. Doesn't quite need another service.
5 second page load is fine. This endless tuning is a great analytical puzzle, but implementing a new feature trumps these complex micro-optimizations that the consumer less and less about, with mobile having already become the common case access (mobile access is already going to be slow from network anyway). It's rare that you get a complaint. Once it's loaded and you have cached as much as possible, you're fine for returning customers which matter more to appease.
It seems like you’re missing the point of the demo. It is purposely not trying to hide the initial load. There’s more (a lot more) to application performance than page load speed. This obsession with page load speed is weird. How many times a day do you open Excel? How many time a day do you click on things in it?
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