Research proves that speed matters: The faster your service is the more it will be used
[Post edited last 5th of June 2008 to insert performance findings from Nigel Pendse's OLAP research study "The BI Survey 7"]
Let us give some pragmatic advice to all “Interactive-Product” Managers out there:
If you make the interaction with your device or service faster
you will increase its usage and value.
This is common sense and not worth to be discussed?
Or you don’t trust such simple rules?
Research results and examples of Business Intelligence (BI) solutions, Google, Twitter and a VCR deliver the facts you are looking for. Even milliseconds seem to make a difference. Find the details below.
Results provided by Nigel Pendse’s Business Intelligence research report:
As in prior OLAP Survey studies, “slow query performance was the most widespread technical problem and this seems to be becoming more common as time passes,” The BI Survey 7 concludes. “Projects that used query performance as an explicit evaluation criterion tended to be more successful than those that did not.” Further, the survey found that “the faster the query performance, the more business benefits are reported and the more likely it is that business goals will be achieved.”
Source: http://www.dmreview.com/specialreports/2008_81/10001298-1.html
Source: http://www.bi-survey.com/
Results provided by Google’s Research:
Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice president of search products and user experience, said during the Google IO conference, May 29th 2008 (as reported on the CNet News blog):
“Google wanted to find out how many search results to show users–the customary 10, or 20, 25, or 30? When asked directly, users said they’d like more results on a page, but testing showed otherwise.
Specifically, Google found that when the results increased to 30 per page, people searched 20 percent less overall, Mayer said. After much analysis of server logs, the company found it was because it took about twice as long to display the longer results list for the user, and speed matters.
“As Google gets faster, people search more, and as it gets slower, people search less,” she said.
The same effect happened with Google Maps. When the company trimmed the 120KB page size down by about 30 percent, the company started getting about 30 percent more map requests. “It was almost proportional. If you make a product faster, you get that back in terms of increased usage,” she said.”
Source: http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9954972-7.html
Research results of Carnegie Mellon University based on a VCR:
Wayne D.Gray , Wai-Tat Fu, Researchers from Carnegie Mellon University, have demonstrated that milliseconds of time can make the difference if information that is available from a service/device is used or not.
Title: “Soft constraints in interactive behavior:the case of ignoring perfect knowledge in-the-world for imperfect knowledge in-the-head”
“In this paper, we examine the use of knowledge in-the-world when the knowledge is on the screen, in a well-known location, and the access effort is typical of that encountered by a user of an operating system that supports multiple, overlapping windows.
We argue that in routine interactive behavior, the path of least effort is a soft constraint that guides interactive behavior and that these soft constraints may be calculated by giving equal weight to the time required for perception, action, and memory retrieval. Milliseconds matter in that differences in effort measured in milliseconds suffice to induce users to ignore perfect knowledge in-the-world for imperfect knowledge in-the-head.”
Gray’s and Fu’s results are based on a simple experimental setup of a VCR emulated on a PC and the following three scenarios:
“1. Information is clearly visible on the screen in front of a user so that the user has free access to information via an eye movement
2. The window is partly visible but the desired information is covered. To uncover the information the user needs to move the mouse to and click on the window to bring it to the foreground. In experiment 1, we mimic this common circumstance by covering the fields of the information window with gray boxes. Field information is uncovered when the gray box is clicked (the Gray-Box condition).
3. Similar to the above, but the partly visible window contains well-learned information and bringing the window to the foreground obscures the original task window. In experiment 1, we make the material in the information window well-learned by requiring the Memory-Test group to study and pass a test on it before the trial begins. During programming only one window is visible at a time, either the task window or the information window.”
Source: http://www.humanfactors.uiuc.edu/Reports&PapersPDFs/JournalPubs/GF04_SoftConstraints-CSj.pdf
Evidence on Twitter:
“When users see downtime, slowness, and instability of the sort that we’ve exhibited this week, they assume that our engineering progress must be stagnant. With the Twitter team working on these issues on and off for over a year, surely downtime should be a thing of the past by now, right?”
Source: http://dev.twitter.com/2008/05/twittering-about-architecture.html
Twitter has until today not been able to fix its performance and related availability issues. Not surprisingly Web Stragegist Jeremiah Owyang suggested today on Twitter (inline with common sense and the research results above) to stop using Twitter and to go back to use email:
Closing comment:
Hopefully you agree, that all this is supporting strongly our advice to all “Interactive-Product” managers. Let us repeat it here once again, so that you do not lose a millisecond by having to scroll up (and maybe you would - because of the required milliseconds effort - not scroll up and as a consequence forget our message or -please no- remember the wrong thing):
Make the interaction with your device or service faster
and you will increase its usage and value.
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Mai 30th, 2008 at 10:46 pm and is filed under Interesting Links. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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