4 second rule
November 10, 2006 | In Development |I’ve just read an interesting piece on the BBC News website. A survey found that the average time a user will wait for an online shopping site to load is now 4 seconds. We always worked to the 8 second rule, so that has halved it.
Apparantly they also found that a third of the respondents would form a bad opinion of the company as well. Rather harsh I think.
I have some sympathy here though, as I too will turn away from a site that takes too long to load. It is a fine line I think between providing an interesting media rich experience, and not having the site take forever to load. I suspect the increasing take-up of broadband is fueling this drop in waiting times, and it presents the designers and developers with some interesting problems.