Collected thoughts about software and site performance ...
Web performance matters. Responsive sites can make the online experience effective, even enjoyable. A slow site can be unusable. This site is about online performance, how to achieve and maintain it, its impact on user experience, and ultimately on site effectiveness.
Home | Entries about Performance Objectives (7), in reverse date order:
Four Laws of Web Site Performance
Managing Response Time for Web Sites and Web Applications
Human beings don’t like to wait. We don’t like waiting in line at a store, we don’t like waiting for our food at a restaurant, and we definitely don’t like waiting for Web pages to load.
Those words open Web Page Response Time 101, an excellent article by Alberto Savoia. Although it was published in July 2001, it remains every bit as relevant and useful today. It does a really good job of explaining and summarizing two fundamental aspects of Web performance -- human behavior and site behavior.
Chris Loosley
in Articles and White Papers, Performance Management, Performance Objectives, Measuring Performance
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Acceptable Response Times
Response Time Standards for Web Sites and Web Applications
It feels like hardly a single day has passed in the past six years that someone hasn't asked me this questions: "What is the industry standard response time for a Web page?" And in the past six years, the answer hasn't changed, not even a little bit. So if the answer hasn't changed, why am I still getting asked the question on virtually a daily basis?
That is a quote from Acceptable application response times vs. industry standard, an article by Scott Barber published by TechTarget on March 13, 2007.
As I read Scott's article, I found myself in strong agreement with every point. By the end, I realized that Scott had echoed and summarised many previous posts of mine. So I have used Scott's words as a framework to collect together references to my previous articles on the subject of performance objectives -- what they should be, and how you should set them:
Chris Loosley
in Articles and White Papers, Performance Management, Business Perspectives, Performance Objectives
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1 Reference
Delight, Satisfy, or Frustrate?
Web page download time and site usability
Two recent posts (here and here) have discussed the relationships among user expectations, site responsiveness, and user satisfaction. As a general rule, people's perception of a site's quality and credibility diminishes as its download times increase.
So what are the implications of this research for an organization embarking on a program of Service Level Management (SLM) or Web Performance Management? How do you keep users satisfied?
Chris Loosley
in Business Perspectives, Performance Objectives
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WYSIWYG, or No Site is an Island
Customer expectations of Web page download times
When writing about Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), I discussed Robert B. Miller's classic research into computer responsiveness and its relevance today to questions of Web site design and site usability. For one response to Miller's findings (by providing more percent-done indicators and busy cursors) see Jakob Nielsen's Web site and his best-selling book, Designing Web Usability.
But Miller's three thresholds are far from the whole story ...
Chris Loosley
in Foundations of Performance, Performance Objectives
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The Miller Response-Time Test
Web page download time and usability
In the field of Human-Computer Interaction, HCI for short, one crucial and much-studied aspect is the speed of the computer's response to various kinds of user inputs. Although a few of these studies do get quoted in discussions of Web site design and Web usability, most books and articles on these topics devote very little space to this aspect.
One of the best summaries appears in Andrew B. King's book Speed up Your Site, which opens with the simple observation that People hate to wait. His first chapter (Response Time: Eight Seconds, Plus or Minus Two) includes a brief history of HCI research into the influence of computer response time on user satisfaction (or frustration), and an overview of its relevance to Web site usability.
Chris Loosley
in Foundations of Performance, Performance Objectives
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Practical Service Level Management
If you would like to read a book about SLM for the Web, I recommend Practical Service Level Management: Delivering High-Quality Web-Based Services by John McConnell and Eric Siegel [Amazon].
The publisher's description does a pretty good job of describing the content and purpose of the book ...
Chris Loosley
in Performance Management, Performance Objectives, Book Reviews
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When is Your Web Site Fast Enough?
When your business is your Web site, and site responsiveness affects customer satisfaction, how much to budget for improving site performance becomes an important business decision. Companies doing business on the Web must manage both site availability and site responsiveness.
Chris Loosley
in Articles and White Papers, Business Perspectives, Performance Objectives
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