User Expectations of Performance

[00:00:00]
>> Todd Gardner: So, let's talk about, why should I bother making developer stickers online fast? Why is web performance important at all? I have other things to do, I could design a bunch more stickers and put it on the site and hopefully make some more money. Or I could focus on web performance, why should I spend the time doing this?

[00:00:20]
There's three big reasons the why web performance is important. First, user experience, second Search Engine Optimization or SEO and third online advertising. And all three are important for the e-commerce store depending at what kind of website you work on, maybe two of these are important or one of these is important.

[00:00:39]
But one of these is important to every single website on the planet. So, let's talk about each of those in depth, why is web performance important? Well, from a user perspective, from the user coming to your site, generally, we could say, web performance is important, so I don't strangle you with frustration.

[00:00:58]
Because I'm gonna be so angry visiting your site that I'm going to want to leave. If the users feel this, you definitely know you have a web performance problem. But let's be more specific than that, the user experience of your website is how well your website meets or exceeds the expectations of your user.

[00:01:20]
When an internet visitor comes to your site, they have a certain expectation of how fast it's gonna load based on similar sites, historical experience. What they're trying to do, how important your site is to their day-to-day life, all sorts of things, so it's about understanding user expectations. Now you could say, maybe an easier way to solve this is the key to happiness is just to lower everybody's expectations and then we wouldn't have to worry about any of this, you know what?

[00:01:45]
That's a great idea, let's just lower everybody's expectations, the website shouldn't load in less than two minutes, and let's go about our day. Websites would be so much easier to build if we didn't have all these needy high expectations users. Unfortunately, we can't buy fiber connections and fast devices for every single user on the planet, so we have to figure out ways to make our website fast instead.

[00:02:11]
So, let's talk about common user expectations. And this is data based on real research, not weird vendor specific research, but like academic research about human-computer interactions over time. And the IEEE response times found that for effective communication, some sort of response is needed within two seconds of a request.

[00:02:37]
So, if the user makes an action, they should feel something has happened in two seconds. And if they don't, they immediately think this is slow and they feel interrupted. Any weight that's longer than two seconds breaks concentration and affects their productivity. So, if I'm trying to do something, if I click on an ad or if I add something to my cart or if I submit a request to your website in any kind, if you don't give me something in two seconds, I lose what I'm doing.

[00:03:07]
My brain wanders, I have the intention span of a goldfish, and I'm gone and I'm thinking about other things. I'm thinking about the shed I want to build, or something like that, so two seconds. So, it's more granular than that, it's not just two seconds is its magic point.

[00:03:25]
So, usability engineering study found that the user's concentration or the user's interaction with something changes at different rates. So, if you can respond in less than 0.01 seconds, the user feels that's effectively instant. They don't notice any delay, they feel like something happened immediately that's great. If the user experiences one second, they notice it, it's like, something happened, but it doesn't interrupt their flow.

[00:03:54]
It doesn't get in the way of what they're doing, that's not enough time for their brain to switch gears and think about something else, so one second is this cool number. But if you do 10 seconds or more, if something stops for 10 seconds, the users almost universally feel frustration and break their concentration and their flow, they're done.

[00:04:14]
10 seconds is really, really bad in terms of understanding how humans and computers are going to interact. Now, if we apply that directly to websites, and the expectations that users have of the web, time is money. A book on web performance found in a large study that 40% of users, 40% will abandon a site if they wait three seconds over the large data set of all users.

[00:04:46]
So, three seconds, if you don't get there, 40% of them are just gone, 75% of users that experience what they feel is slow. If the user would describe their experience on your website is slow, 75% of them just will never come back. They don't trust your store, they don't like your store, they don't like the experience, they won't look at your cat gifs anymore, they're done, 75% of users are just going to bail.

[00:05:10]
Now, that's just some general expectations around user experience. Your user experience for your app depends a lot on what you're doing and how important that is. And we're going to talk a lot more about that later in the section around setting goals for performance of your site.