5 seconds to deliver the goods

[Brett_Tabke]

Testing firm Red-Gate says you have a half second before frustration sets in:

[red-gate.com...]

Web applications that take more than half a second to provide information frustrate users, and those that take longer than five seconds cause users to abandon them*. It is anticipated that the demands on Web services will be even more extreme in the future.

[datawarehouse.com...]

[rcjordan]

>5 seconds

Recent anecdoctal experience [webmasterworld.com] confirms this -it's supposed to work like TV, sans warmup. The old 30-45 secs is wwwwaaaaaay beyond tolerance range. I'm beginning to think that the veteran surfers are the only ones who know enough to wait.

[txbakers]

I'm intolerant of any site that takes more than 5 seconds to load. If it takes that long, I don't want to see it.

[ergophobe]

I have some friends who are not at all computer savvy who've started using the net. They always think that they've done something wrong if they don't get immediate feedback, so they click submit something like seven times. Then they learn they have to wait, but they of course don't know how to read the status bar, so they just sit there and wait, thiry second, one minute... I did this wrong and bought two of these last time... two minutes... is anything happening...

Watching them, I'd say the half-second rule is probably correct, albeit perhaps impossible given the services some of them use to connect to the net.

Tom