A psychological investigation of long retrieval times on the World Wide Web

With the increasingly rapid uptake of the World Wide Web, even those pages classed as ‘the best of the web’ are not immune to large download latencies. This paper investigates whether the latency between requesting a page and receiving it influence user perceptions of the page. The paper describes a study in which users are presented with seven different web pages with delays ranging from 2 s to 2 min, and are then asked to rate the pages on a number of criteria. Predetermined delays were injected into the page loading process. Pages which were retrieved faster were judged significantly more interesting than their slower counterparts. The implications for web page design are discussed.