[Air-l] The internet and time

[Kevin Guidry]

On 12/10/06, Laura Sheble <sheble at email.unc.edu> wrote:
>
> This might be a slight tangent to time on the internet - the article
> below is about "waiting for services on the internet".  I found it to be
> interesting because, from a user's perspective, it looks at time spent
> waiting both online and when not online

   ...which begins to lean towards more general usability and HCI
studies.  Nielsen briefly mentions this in his book "Usability
Engineering" but, more importantly, he provides a few citations.  An
excerpt from that chapter and a few of the citations can be found at
http://www.useit.com/papers/responsetime.html.  These are particularly
interesting as some of these studies are, relatively speaking, quite
old (the oldest is from 1968); Nielsen's assertion is that "the basic
advice regarding response times has been about the same for thirty
years."  And, of course, this "advice" is based on research about
people's perception of time when performing a task and waiting for a
response (or, ideally, not waiting - or not *feeling* like they're
waiting).


Kevin