Between March 2009 and January 2010, the banking industry has made dramatic improvements in availability, according to data from Gomez.
(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) – In a measure of the fickleness of Web users, nearly a third of consumers start abandoning slow sites within one and five seconds, says Gomez (www.gomez.com), the Web performance division of Compuware Corporation (www.compuware.com) and the author of a new study on the subject.
The independent study, “When Seconds Count,” conducted for Gomez by Equation Research, queried 1,004 web and mobile users on the importance of speed for all web businesses, and cross-checked the results with in-the-field performance monitoring. The study found, among other things, that speed makes an enormous difference when it comes to accessing a website.
Nearly a third of consumers will start abandoning slow sites between one and five seconds, and 84 percent are only willing to retry a slow performing website a few times before giving up. Perhaps the most alarming statistic for those with slow sites is that 37 percent of those polled said they would not return to a slow site, and that 27 percent would likely jump to a competitor’s site.
Gomez chief technology officer Imad Mouline said in a phone interview that the study shows fast websites are raising the bar for user experience, not just for normal websites, but also for mobile applications.
“Part of what we have to realize is that users’ expectations are higher because there are so many sites out there that have taught users to expect that faster load time. The same thing is happening on mobile devices,” Mouline says. “There are commonly used sites that load in one second or less. If they can do it, why can’t all the other sites do the same thing?”
According to the study, a third of all Web users use mobile devices to access the Internet, and more than half of those expect websites to load as quickly, almost as quickly or faster on their mobile phone compared to their home computer.
Also, speed trumps functionality in many cases, with 39 percent of respondents saying speed is more important than functionality, while only one in five rank site functionality as more important.
There is, however, a lot that developers can do to prevent these slow speeds, according to Mouline, and it starts with knowing your users.
“The first thing is simply knowledge,” he said. “It starts with understanding who your users are. That is fundamental to designing the right website, and you have to ask the right questions.”
These questions include where users are geographically – east or west coast, for instance – but also from a micro-geographic perspective. “Are they at home or at work? Are they on a device? Are they walking around when they’re on that device? Is there a chance that you’ll lose connectivity because they’re about to go into the subway?”
He notes, however, that the larger geography, depending on the application, is “probably one of the biggest culprits today in terms of delivery of end-user performance.” After all, at the network level, latency between the east and west coast or between the North America and Europe may be measured in hundreds of milliseconds, but for applications or websites, that translates to multiple seconds.
Mouline says that almost as important as knowing who your application user is, is knowing your application.
“The application is not what the developer creates, the application is what the end user sees – and those two things are very different.”
The end user experience is often a collection of content from a variety of locations that is assembled in real-time in the browser. In this way, third-party services can slow down an otherwise quick site.
Performance-monitoring services, which are focused on the end-user experience, enable developers to gain this insight, which, of course, can have a huge effect on a business’ success.
“If end-users find a site slow or difficult to use, no matter what type of website it is, they’ll either find ways to work around it or leave for a competitive site, which impacts the bottom line,” says Mouline.
No related posts.
