The effects of Internet latency on user perception of information content

With the growing popularity of the Internet and World-Wide Web, it is becoming increasingly important for designers of distributed multimedia to understand how to efficiently and effectively provide content and organization in their documents. Although studies of traditional hypermedia provide some general guidelines for designers, developing publicly-accessible multimedia on the Internet introduces several new challenges. In particular, the effect of Internet latencies on a user's perception of the information content, quality and organization of a site (on the World-Wide Web or some other distributed architecture), is unknown. We have performed a study in which users browsed several versions of a World-Wide Web site, each instrumented with different delay characteristics. Our findings indicate that the speed at which information is delivered to users has a statistically significant impact on the users' perception of the information.