A study on tolerable waiting time: How long are web users willing to wait?

• Main Author: NAH, Fiona Fui-hoon
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2003
• Subjects: WWW; tolerable waiting time; computer response time; Databases and Information Systems; E-Commerce; Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/10073; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/11073/viewcontent/A_Study_on_Tolerable_Waiting_Time__How_Long_Are_Web_Users_Willing_to_Wait_.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

The WWW has become an important channel for information access, electronic commerce, and publication. With an exponential increase in the number of Web users and the popularity of multimedia technology, users often face a long waiting time for downloading Web pages. Although various technologies and techniques have been implemented to alleviate the situation and to comfort the impatient users, little research has been done to assess what constitutes an acceptable and tolerable waiting time for Web users. This research reviews the literature on computer response time and users’ waiting time, and assesses Web users’ tolerable waiting time in information retrieval. It addresses the following question through an empirical study: How long are users willing to wait for a Web page to be downloaded before abandoning it? The results from this study suggest that the tolerable waiting time for information retrieval is approximately 2 seconds.