A PSYCHOLOGICAL INVESTIGATION OF LONG RETRIEVAL TIMES ON THE WORLD-WIDE-WEB

With the increasingly rapid uptake of the World Wide Web, even those p ages classed as 'the best of the web' are not immune to large download latencies. This paper investigates whether the latency between reques ting a page and receiving it influence user perceptions of the page. T he paper describes a study in which users are presented with seven dif ferent web pages with delays ranging from 2 s to 2 min, and are then a sked to rate the pages on a number of criteria. Predetermined delays w ere injected into the page loading process, Pages which were retrieved faster were judged significantly more interesting than their slower c ounterparts, The implications for web page design are discussed. (C) 1 998 Published by Elsevier Science B.V.