4 Seconds - part I

I've just read an article on the Sydney Morning Herald site claiming: "According to a new report on consumer behaviour, four seconds is the longest that online shoppers are prepared to wait for a site to load before backing out of the transaction."

This is followed about two sentences later by: "It found that the average shopper will abandon an online store if forced to wait more than four seconds for pages to load."

So, either 4 seconds is the longest time shoppers are willing to wait - representing the extreme upper fringe; or it's what the 'average' user is prepared to wait before abandoning a process. Since these are two very different things, I'm currently trying to get my hands on a copy of the full report available from the report's sponsor Akamai (they're in the business of providing 'Content delivery, Application Performance Management, and Streaming Media Services').

After filling in the obligatory form on the Akamai site so that I can lay hands on the free copy of the report, I'm currently just getting the following:

"Service Unavailable - DNS failure
The server is temporarily unable to service your request. Please try again later.

Reference #11.95088790.1163111838.a9fda45"

I'll provide more information on this whole saga when Akamai corrects this little fault and gives me access to the report.

User research: subjectivity and objectivity in practice

My latest article - and the first article in my new column - went live at UXMatters yesterday. Have a read of the article and let me know what you think.

Since Oz-IA and other recent events...

Since the Oz IA retreat things have been rather hectic around here. We're in the final stages of developing a major Web-based business application that utilises AJAX throughout the interface to provide a more responsive experience for the users. My work on the project commenced in March 2004 with a high-level conceptual architecture and has progressed through various stages since then. Four more weeks should hopefully see us finished with the main body of the application, leaving integration into other systems as the last stage.

I've also been busily working on writing a column for UXMatters, which I hope you'll see in the near, near future. The column's about user research generally and starts with a review of some recent debate about the merits of user research; I'm hoping it isn't too abstract for the readers.

A couple of recent projects have finished off well, and been well-received. Our site for Tourism Queensland - Queensland Holidays - won an award recently, for which we were all pretty happy.

On a more personal note, the summer is almost upon us and with it a new season of international cricket!! I'm looking forward to the Ashes series, and if you look carefully you'll see me parked on a seat in the Ladies Stand for the duration.

I'm not sure how many of you may have attended my presentation at the Oz-IA conference, but the feedback I've received so far has been largely positive, including this from Zef in NZ who says I hurt his brain - but in a good way.

More soon...