Technology is seductive, and so is the human desire to get ahead of the Joneses with the neatest, the coolest, the newest, and the most advanced. The problem is that lots of times that's an interesting use of technology, but not a wise one.
Using technology wisely means using technology in ways that enhance your visitorsā and customersā experience. Very often, that's not the use of the newest or fanciest technology or design.
There are two places that designers seem to fall down on this. The first one is on load speed, and the second is on using browser plug-ins.
Let's take load speed first. Scientists have been doing human attention span studies for decades. They found out that, for most North Americans, somewhere between nine and twelve seconds is just about as long as we're willing to wait for something significant to happen.
When you look at how that works on a Web site, what you find is that folks will wait right around that time for a Web page on a new site to load. If it isn't loaded in that time, they hit the "stopä button and click off to someplace else.
If that happens to you, it doesn't matter how good your site would be if they visited it, because they won't. So, the first thing you need to know about load speed is that that page has got to come up, for a new visitor, in about ten seconds or less.
The second thing you need to know is that most of the folks who visit your site are probably going to do it using a dial-up connection and a modem speed of somewhere around 56KBS. Most of your visitors won't have high-speed connections.
What about all that high bandwidth you've heard about? It just isn't there yet. The most aggressive estimates we have of the number of households with high-speed connections (cable modems, DSL, or ISDN) say that only about 12% of U. S. households have them. That means that 88% don't.
So what about businesses? There the number of high-bandwidth connections are higher, but still less than half. And that doesn't take into account the folks who might have a high-speed connection at the office but who aren't in the office right then. Studies by both Cisco Systems and Hewlett-Packard of their workforce found that about a third of them, on any given day, aren't in the office. In fact, many of them aren't in any office, they're between places.
Those folks are connecting using phone lines in airports, hotels, and over cell phones. It's more dial-up connections most of the time.
The summary of that, when it comes to load time, is you need to design your site so that it loads, for a first-time visitor, in ten seconds or less when they're using a dial-up connection, such as America Online.
Just so you know that it's possible, Yahoo, one of the Web's most popular sites performs this load feat in about seven seconds.
Well, I also mentioned plug-ins. What about them?
Plug-ins are the things that your browser needs to show certain kinds of special effects, such as streaming audio and video and some animations and special effects. There are two problems with plug-ins.
Problem number one is that they slow the process down because the plug-in has to be loaded. Problem number two is that many of your visitors won't have the particular plug-in that they need to view your site the way you want it. Even worse, many of them won't download the plug-in even if you offer it to them.
Making It Work
Start by designing your defaults and your entry pages for the lowest common denominator -- a visitor or user who's using a dial-up connection such as America Online and a plain browser with no fancy plug-ins.
If you've got stuff that requires things that slow down the page or really need plug-ins, don't put them on your entry pages or make them something that everyone has to see. Instead, make them a special benefit for those willing to make the wait or use the plug-in.
When things are going to take a while to load, let folks know. Usability research finds that they're willing to wait much longer if they know things will take awhile.
Here's one of the rules that I use when we're engaging a designer for one of my clients. If it winks, if it blinks, if it moves, if it splits the screen, or if it generates the message "loadingä it shouldn't be on every page unless it has an absolutely necessary business purpose.
Created/Revised/Reviewed: 30 July 2002
This is only one Big Idea. You'll find more in Wally's book, What's the Big Idea? and in his Big Idea column. There's a complete list on the Main Big Idea page. You may also order the book by clicking here.
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