In this post, a closer look at a memorable and alarming statistic leads to a more general discussion of things that annoy website customers, and a bit about the questionnaire versus user trials controversy...
Sometimes I see a statistic that I know I'm going to see quoted a lot. An example is one from eMarketer in an article called Online Retailers Face Four-Second Barrier
Now, as the all-important
online holiday shopping season nears, and the competition for online
shoppers increases, a new report from Akamai Technologies advises e-tailers to be on their toes — because a few heartbeats can make the difference between a sale and a lost customer.
The research shows that four seconds is the maximum
length of time an average online shopper will wait for a Web page to
load before abandoning one retail site and moving on to another.
"The critical takeaway from this research is that online
shoppers not only demand quality site performance, they expect it,"
said Brad Rinklin of Akamai. "Four seconds is the new benchmark by
which a retail site will be judged, which leaves little room for error
for retailers to maintain a loyal online customer base."
The article is quoting a new report by Akami and Jupiter Research (registration is needed to view the report). It looks like a good enough piece of work the methodology section of the paper explains:
"In April 2006, JupiterResearch designed and fielded a survey to online consumers selected randomly from the Ipsos US online consumer panel. A total of 1,058 individuals responded to the survey. Respondents were asked approximately 15 closed-ended questions about their behaviors, attitudes, and preferences as they relate to buying and researching products and services online. Respondents received an e-mail invitation to participate in the survey with an attached URL linked to the Web-based survey form. The samples were carefully balanced by a series of demographic and behavioral characteristics to ensure that they were representative of the online population. Demographic weighting variables included age, gender, household income, household education, household type, region, market size, race, and Hispanic ethnicity. Additionally, JupiterResearch took the unconventional step of weighting the data by AOL usage, online tenure, and connection speed (broadband versus dial-up), three key determinants of online behavior. Balancing quotas are derived from JupiterResearch’s Internet Population Model, which relies on US Census Bureau data and a rich foundation of primary consumer survey research to determine the size, demographics, and ethnographics of the US online population. The survey data are fully applicable to the US online population within a confidence interval of plus or minus three percent."
When I hear the "new 4-second rule" being quoted at me, though I will try to remember the following bits from the actual report:
- "Thirty-three percent of consumers shopping via a broadband connection will wait no more than four seconds for a Web page to render." (From Fig 3 of the report:30% of broadband customers said they would would wait 5-6 seconds, and a further 38% would wait more than 6 seconds. Only 19% of dial-up customers said they would leave if a single page took longer than 4 seconds to render).
- From Fig 2 of the report, in which respondents were asked to remember what annoyed them about their last unsatisfactory e-tail experience, slow pages was the third biggest annoyance (quoted by 33%) compared with high prices (44%) and shipping/handling issues (39%). Annoyance at the need to register, or "website was frustrating/confusing" came joint fourth.
- In Fig 5, customers are asked how they would react to their bad experience, and this was correlated with what they complained about - interestingly, there isn't much difference in the reaction of people who remember a crash from those who found the site too slow or confusing (or who found the checkout process too slow). The most likely reaction was to visit the site less often, "purchase from another online retailer" comes third. I'd have thought that a crash was worse than slow pages, but maybe not.
Slow-loading pages is of course not a new "annoyance" the eMarketer article quotes a 2005 study (Taylor Nelson Sofres) in which slow pages came out as the 5th most popular thing to be ranked by customers as "extremely annoying" (the top 4 were pop-up ads (84%); requiring installation of extra software to view the site (72%); Dead links (66%) and requirement to register before viewing site (61%). I can't think of anyone who says slow pages are good per se. As usual there's a trade-off some sites continue to have slow pages because they reckon the page will work so well when you do see it.
So while having slow pages is not good, it is not quite the stark 4 seconds and you are dead! But I'm going to hear this figure a lot because while it may not be completely right it is very memorable enough for a sort of e-marketer's 1066 And All That. At best I guess it is a rule of a thumb that has been dipped in a pinch of salt.
Actually what seems more realistic to me is an idea from Steve Krug's book "Don't Make me Think" - imagine the customer arrives at your website with a reservoir of patience and good will to you and your business. The initial size of this reservoir depends on a lot of factors, including their previous experiences with you, their overall mood and to-do list that day, how motivated they are to do stuff on your site and so on. Their "good will level" goes up or down according to how the site treats them - but the point at which goodwill=0 and they say "aw the heck with it!" is going to vary.
This is probably the point at least to mention that old grip that some usability study folks have with questionnaire data - that "self-reported claims are unreliable" (sometimes this is said to be "Nielsen's first rule"). That is - what people say they thought or happened is not always how it seems if you watch them. This is one of the interesting objections raised on a discussion at cre8asite about whether it was worth putting questionnaires on a website. The "don't bother" camp seemed to win that debate on that site, a bit to my surprise - I'd have thought that what customers perceive as reality is as interesting as what someone else perceives their reality is....
