Season's Greetings

As the year winds down to a semi-close, I wanted to wish you all a very happy & safe holiday season.

See you in 2007.

webblast, webjam 2006 - awesome!

My sense of euphoria and positivism with my chosen industry has been bolstered in the past few weeks by two really cool, emotionally uplifting events hosted by different segments of the Web community here in Australia.

Since '97 I've seen the Web industry in Australia go through a period of 'golden child'-hood, market darling, crash victim and pariah. We wandered in the wilderness for 3 or 4 depressing years after 2001 where we hardly talked to one another, got into petty flame-wars on lists, and struggled to regain our sense of purpose, place, and direction.

Last night I had the pleasure of attending the first webjam event in Sydney. The concept is simple, yet novel: 20 speakers get 3 minutes each to present to an audience of Web industry professionals about something cool they've worked on in 2006. The audience got to vote for their favourite presentation via an SMS voting tool, and prizes were awarded for the most popular speaker, and 'door prizes' for 7 lucky voters.

The presentations were mixed, from News Labs new offerings to some neat javascript widgets, to social network mapping tools, mash-ups and a host of others. All were interesting - some very - but that wasn't what made the night special for me...

It was the sense of sharing, community, and mutual respect that eminated throughout the room as luminaries and lesser lights stood up under the supportive attention of their peers and strutted their stuff. It was the spontaneous applause; the laughter; the mingling and storytelling that went on as people reconnected with friends and colleagues.

Two weeks ago Webblast - a shared Christmas event bringing together industry pros from a range of groups ( Web Standards, IA-Peers, PHP Users, to name a few) - was a resounding success. 180 people talking, chatting, meeting new & familiar faces. The event was oversubscribed within 36hours of the announcement going out: I think we could have seen 300+ had the venue been able to accommodate them all.

I can only commend the efforts of the people who organised these two events, and the various sponsors who supported them, for putting on two very memorable and enjoyable events. I'm already looking forward to 2007, and looking back on 2006 a lot less jaded than I started the year.

Thank you.

4 seconds - Part II

OK, Akamai seem to have recovered from their little glitch & I now have a copy of the report. The detail of the report paints a very different picture from what's being reported in the press release and the media. This should serve as a lesson for you all not to rely on the media for your research - track down the primary source for the article and read it (carefully) for yourself.

Some questions I have for the report authors, journalists & PR people at the various companies:

• on the headline finding of the report - that "Four seconds is the maximum length of time an average online shopper will wait for a Web page to load before potentially abandoning a retail site." - the report data indicates a very different picture: 80% of dial-up users, and 68% of broadband users will wait longer than 4 seconds before leaving a Web site. Looking at the detailed data from the report, I can't see any way to arrive at an 'average' measure of 4 seconds. Neither the mean, mode or median values for the data come out at 4 seconds. The lowest figure I can arrive at is at least 5 seconds, and possibly quite a bit higher.
• Broadband users start to consider abandonment after less than 1 second in some cases (1% of broadband respondents). Dial-up users show a little more patience, starting to abandon the site after 1-2 secs of waiting (3%). Wouldn't this be a better way to report the findings? "Online shoppings start abandoning sites after 1 second of waiting"
  
• From the original report: "Roughly 75% of online shoppers who experience a site freezing or crashing, that is too slow to render, or that involves a convoluted checkout process would no longer buy from that site". The respondents were asked to indicate whether they would be 'less likely to buy from the retailer again online' - not whether they definitely would not. This is a significant difference in interpretation of the data, and leads to the sort of attention-seeking articles shown below.
  

How the article was reported elsewhere:
Slashdot: "Of course we all want webpages to load as fast as possible, but now research has finally shown it: four seconds loading time is the maximum threshold for websurfers. Akamai and JupiterResearch have conducted a study among 1,000 online shoppers and have found, among other results, that one third of respondents have, at one point, left a shopping website because of the overall 'poor experience.' 75% of them do not intend ever to come back to this website again. Online shopper loyalty also increases as loading time of webpages decreases. Will this study finally show developers of shopping websites the importance of the performance of their websites?"

What's wrong here:

• four seconds is not the maximum threshold for websurfers. 80% of dial-up & 68% of broadband users indicated they would typically wait longer than this for a page to load;
• 75% of respondents indicated they would be less likely to return to the site; not that they had no intention of returning;
• The report does not correlate an increase in online shopper loyalty to a decrease in webpage loading time: it indicated the converse (slower loading time correlates to decreased loyalty), which is not necessarily the same thing.
  

InformationWeek: "The survey found that more than one-third of online shoppers abandoned sites entirely whenever they suffered a poor experience. Some 75% of the online shoppers polled said they wouldn't be likely to use the sites in question after they had a poor shopping experience."

What's wrong:

• More than one third of dissatisfied online shoppers who also abandoned a site did so due to load times, errors or crashes. The percentage of abandonments due to all sources of dissatisfaction ('poor experience') was not reported, but is also presumably higher than one third.
  
• Again with the 75% of online shoppers (see above)

Sydney Morning Herald: "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."

What's wrong:

• Again, 68% of broadband and 80% of dial-up users indicated in their survey response they would wait longer than 4 seconds for a page to load;
• Slow loading times was a source of dissatisfaction for 33% of respondents;
• 18% indicated they had abandoned a transaction due to the slow page loading on the site.

Somewhat interestingly, the biggest recorded factor affecting the likelihood that a dissatisfied online shopper would also shop with that retailer off-line was the convoluted or confusing checkout process.