How Long is Too Long to Wait for a Website to Load?

The number one complaint reported by Internet users continues to be download speed or taking too long to load web pages (GVU web site, 1998). It has been reported that users are more likely to lose interest in a site if the download time exceeds 10 seconds (Nielson, 1996). Recent studies have investigated how perceptions of websites are influenced by delays in retrieval times (Ramsay et al., 1998; Sears et al., 1997). Pages with longer delays were rated as less interesting and more difficult to find. Thus, users ' subjective evaluations of webpages can be affected by retrieval delays, but what happens to performance on the website? To explore this question, we examined the effect of delays on user performance on a website. To do this, users located task information on an airline website that had been previously tested and ranked high on preference and performance measures (Selvidge, 1999). The website was downloaded to control the delay lengths of page loading time. The first experiment examined delay lengths by varying the delay time (1, 10, and 20 seconds) before users could view a particular webpage. This study measured degree of "lostness", task success, frustration, and task difficulty as a function of delay time. The lostness measure, which is the users ' ability to find specific information, is the ratio of the optimal number of nodes required to complete a task to the actual number of nodes visited whil