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

Author

Fiona Fui-hoon NAH, Singapore Management UniversityFollow

Publication Type

Conference Proceeding Article

Version

publishedVersion

Publication Date

8-2003

Abstract

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.

Keywords

WWW, tolerable waiting time, computer response time

Discipline

Databases and Information Systems | E-Commerce | Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing

Research Areas

Information Systems and Management

Areas of Excellence

Digital transformation

Publication

Proceedings of the 9th Americas Conference on Information Systems (AMCIS 2003), Tampa, FL, USA, August 4-6

First Page

2212

Last Page

2222

Publisher

AIS

City or Country

Tampa, Florida

Citation

NAH, Fiona Fui-hoon. A study on tolerable waiting time: How long are web users willing to wait?. (2003). Proceedings of the 9th Americas Conference on Information Systems (AMCIS 2003), Tampa, FL, USA, August 4-6. 2212-2222.
Available at: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/10073

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.

Additional URL

https://aisel.aisnet.org/amcis2003/285/?utm_source=aisel.aisnet.org%2Famcis2003%2F285&utm_medium=PDF&utm_campaign=PDFCoverPages