On 12/10/06, Laura Sheble <sheble@email.unc.edu> wrote:
This might be a slight tangent to time on the internet - the article below is about "waiting for services on the internet". I found it to be interesting because, from a user's perspective, it looks at time spent waiting both online and when not online
...which begins to lean towards more general usability and HCI studies. Nielsen briefly mentions this in his book "Usability Engineering" but, more importantly, he provides a few citations. An excerpt from that chapter and a few of the citations can be found at http://www.useit.com/papers/responsetime.html. These are particularly interesting as some of these studies are, relatively speaking, quite old (the oldest is from 1968); Nielsen's assertion is that "the basic advice regarding response times has been about the same for thirty years." And, of course, this "advice" is based on research about people's perception of time when performing a task and waiting for a response (or, ideally, not waiting - or not *feeling* like they're waiting). Kevin