Comments on: Perceptions of page loading speed

By: AlastairC

AlastairC — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 20:27:59 +0000

Surely you get the factorial effect (where each page also links to previous pages) so it’s 7*6*5? (Aiming for the smart-arse award

You’re right though, I still have friends on dial-up, and for them the web is turning into rather a walled garden experience, there are many sites they won’t visit.

By: Dave

Dave — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 19:21:20 +0000

3 clicks by 7 +/- 2 works out to 7*7*7, or 343 pages…which is mostly irrelevant. : )

As bandwidth to the end-user increases, I’ve seen the actual .htm file increase in size…I used to try to keep the HTML under 5kb, and now I run across non-multimedia sites whose front pages are around 100K, and the images and CSS are another 200K+ on top of that.

By: AlastairC

AlastairC — Thu, 15 Feb 2007 16:36:58 +0000

lol, I usually hear the 3 clicks and 7 +/- 2 navigation elements, which gives you about 27 pages?

That’s not usually to hard to overcome in people’s minds any more, there being so many obvious examples where it can’t be the case (and research on it).

Thanks for the link Andy, it looks like a good overview of quite a few aspects of people’s perceptions.

By: patrick h. lauke

patrick h. lauke — Thu, 15 Feb 2007 02:05:28 +0000

well, as long as every page is only a maximum of 2 clicks away from your homepage (regardless of complexity of your site) and you don’t have 7 +/- 2 links in your navigation, you’re golden anyway. oh wait…let’s apply those golden rules to amazon for a minute…

By: Andrew Arch

Andrew Arch — Thu, 15 Feb 2007 01:45:29 +0000

Thanks for that - though perception is reality. See "Are We There Yet? Effects of Delay on User Perceptions of Web Sites"