Friday Four: Gone fishin’ edition

30 Jul 2010

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I’m off for a week-long unplugged getaway with my wife and boys. On that theme, I leave you with this set of links:

CNN Health: Why we can’t unplug on vacation
“The impulse to check messages frequently relates to a psychological principle called a variable reinforcement schedule, says Uzzi. That means when animals — or humans — are rewarded randomly for a particular behavior, it’s harder to get them to stop the behavior than if they had been rewarded consistently for the same behavior.”

Five techie gadgets that are must haves when you travel
 The personal video network from VUE — allowing paranoid globetrotters to monitor their homes via streaming webcam — was a surprise to see on this list.

Top 100 ebooks
 Ebooks don’t count as technology, right? I mean, technically you’re still unplugged.  Right? </self-serving rationalization> At any rate, here’s a list of the current top sellers on Amazon, along with a list of the 100 most-downloaded free ebooks. (Cool to see The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes show up in the #6 spot here. If you haven’t read any of the Holmes books, do. You can thank me later.)

John Harvey Kellogg and the Battle Creek Sanitarium
A refreshing reminder that the ability to turn an ordinary vacation into a gadget-riddled survival exercise is not new to the human condition.

By: Josh Bixby Category: Ecommerce

Psychology and Web Performance: Some quick facts and ideas

29 Jul 2010

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I’ll be the first person to admit that I’m no expert on the psychology of web performance. But I am a person who uses the web regularly, and I’ve had my fair share of emotional responses to online experiences, good and bad, and I have my own pet theories about them. As you probably do, too. And if you’re anything like me, you find these visceral reactions fascinating — if only as reflections of our own fascinating selves. :)

But as I said, I’m not an expert on any of this. That’s why I’ve asked Stoyan Stefanov, whose Psychology of Performance session was incredibly popular at the recent Velocity conference, to let me interview him for an upcoming post. Right now I’m doing some research and working on my questions, and wanted to jot down a few interesting things I’ve learned.

In a recent post on website response times, usability guru Jakob Nielsen said that human responses to poor load times is based on two aspects of how we operate:

  1. Poor short-term memory - Information stored in our short-term memory decays quickly, which is why we don’t perform as well when we have to wait, even for just a few seconds.
  2. Need to feel in control - Being forced to wait makes us feel powerless and frustrated.

He went on to break down our reactions to page delays into specific time increments:

  • 0.1 seconds gives us the illusion of instantaneous response.
  • 1 second keeps our flow of though seamless.
  • 10 seconds keeps out attention, just barely.
  • After 10 seconds, we start thinking about other things, making it harder to get back into our task when the website finally responds.

Lenny Rachitsky frequently lectures on issues surrounding downtime and transparency, and much of what he speaks and writes about centres around what makes people tick. In a recent post on his blog, he quoted this article about the concept of “learned helplessness”:

The concept of learned helplessness was developed in the 1960s and 1970s by Martin Seligman at the University of Pennsylvania. He found that animals receiving electric shocks, which they had no ability to prevent or avoid, were unable to act in subsequent situations where avoidance or escape was possible. Extending the ramifications of these findings to humans, Seligman and his colleagues found that human motivation [...] is undermined by a lack of control over one’s surroundings.

In other words, the less control that people have over their environment, they less they care about outcomes. In other other words, if you design a site that makes users feel out of control, they will not care about completing their goals on your site.

And a few thoughts from Stoyan’s blog:

“When people perceive that you exceed expectations, they are happy and everything is fast and pleasurable. So you have to care about how users perceive your page load time and also what their expectations were. Naturally, both of these are subjective to begin with.”

“…time also flows differently depending on the age – perceived 3 minutes for a 20 year old are in reality 3:03 and for a 60 year old 3 minutes are in reality 3:40.”

“There’s a fascinating study (and podcast) that claim ‘the truth about download time’. The findings were that when people complete their task they perceive the site as fast, although it may be slower than another site that frustrated them.”

“But still, the findings that task completion determines you speed perception is fascinating and something to keep in mind when designing user interactions. If you bog down the user with pages and pages of lengthy forms with insanely strict and annoying validation, then no amount of super fast page loading will cause the people judge your site fast.”

Do you know of any studies or sources relating to site speed and human psychology? Let me know.

Related posts:

By: Josh Bixby Category: Human factors Tags: , , , ,

Case Study: How Symantec is showing its visitors the wrong content first

28 Jul 2010

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In my post on how to read waterfall charts, I touched on the importance of knowing how quickly a page starts to render, because this can have a powerful effect on a visitor’s perception of your site’s overall speed.

This is all true, but here’s where it gets a bit tricky. Yes, it’s important to know when a page starts to render and how long it takes to fully load. But this information isn’t enough. You also need to look at which elements are rendering first and make sure those are the elements you most want your users to see.

Sounds elementary, right? And yet time after time I see sites that make the same mistake: having their most important content load dead last.

Case study: Symantec

Take for example this case study provided by Jakob Nielsen. His team recently conducted an eyetracking study in which they monitored how people viewed a landing page on the Symantec website.

This graphic shows all the places a visitor’s eyes fell when viewing a page that they perceived as loading instantaneously:

Norton: Visitor eye gaze patterns for page that downloads instantly

Notice how the visitor’s gaze spends a significant amount of time on the yellow slideshow widget, the most critical content on the page.

Now compare that gaze pattern to this graphic, which shows all the places a visitor’s eyes fell on the same page when the slideshow widget took 8 seconds to load:

Norton: Visitor eye gaze patterns for page that loads in 8 seconds

Notice how the visitor looked at the empty yellow box a few times while waiting for something to appear, then gave up and spent the rest of their time looking at the rest of the page.

This slideshow widget was the most important piece of content on the entire page, and yet it was the last thing visitors saw. And even after the slideshow fully loaded, the visitor never even glanced at it.

As Jakob observes in his post:

The user who had to endure the download delay spent only 1% of her total viewing time within this space. In contrast, the user who in effect received instantaneous page rendering (because he didn’t look until it was done), spent 20% of his viewing time within the slideshow area.

Let’s look at this problem another way

I wanted to see if Symantec has addressed this usability problem yet, so I ran this page of their site through Webpagetest.* (Jakob’s test took place a while back, on a page that is no longer on the site, so I chose a landing page as similar as possible to the one he used.)

Here’s the waterfall of the results:

The page started to render in just over 4 seconds, and fully loaded in 7.3 seconds — an okay, if not awesome, performance. But let’s look a little bit closer, first in video:

It’s apparent that the featured content widget is still one of the last page elements to load. Now let’s slow it all down and take a frame-by-frame look at the video so that we can see exactly what loads when.

First up, we can see that page elements don’t start to appear until 4.5 seconds:

Webpagetest: Symantec at 4.5 seconds

Next, we see the yellow box that houses the promo widget appears at 5.6 seconds:

And finally, the promo content shows up at 7.1 seconds:

So what to do with this information?

Before reading about Jakob’s eyetracking study, it would be easy to ignore these seemingly tiny lag times. But armed with this information, and knowing that when it comes to web performance and conversion rates, every millisecond counts, it’s clear that this is a performance problem that needs to be fixed. That widget needs to be one of the first, not one of the last, elements to download.

Your tasks

  1. Identify which are the most important pages on your site.
  2. On those pages, prioritize the most important pieces of content.
  3. Analyze those pages using a third-party tool that lets you see the order in which the page elements load, and how long it takes for each of them to load.
  4. Using either a manual or automated solution, tweak your content so that it loads according to its priority.
  5. Repeat as pages change, as new pages are added, and as new browser versions are released.

*Test conducted on 07/28/10 at 11:05:19 from Dulles, VA. Simulated results on IE7 via DSL. See full test results here.

Related posts:

By: Josh Bixby Category: Browsers, Case studies Tags: , , , ,

Yahoo’s new applet promises real-world end-user performance reporting

26 Jul 2010

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Just last week, I talked about why we need to use page test tools that give us information about how users in the real world experience our websites. Yahoo’s new open-source applet, boomerang, is a potentially promising solution:

boomerang is a piece of javascript that you add to your web pages, where it measures the performance of your website from your end user’s point of view. It has the ability to send this data back to your server for further analysis. With boomerang, you find out exactly how fast your users think your site is.

boomerang measures round trips, bandwidth and latency (get specifics here) and, according to its developers, can be applied to a variety of use cases.

I’m in the process of compiling a directory of diagnostic tools, along with mini reviews. If you have hands-on experience with boomerang, or if you want to suggest any other tools, let me know.

Related posts:

By: Josh Bixby Category: Industry news, Tools Tags: , , , , ,

Friday Four: Telecommuting, Games in the Workplace, and Facebook Timesucking

23 Jul 2010

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In Defense of Games in the Workplace
 In this interview by Mac Slocum, “Gamestorming” author Dave Gray talks about how games cut through creative chaos: “Gamestorming is a great approach when you are entering into unknown territory, when you need to imagine or design for the future, and when you need to tap creative energy. What games are best at is facilitating collaboration and innovation.”

Debunking the Myths of the Telecommute
About half of our employees at Strangeloop telecommute, and they are all amazingly productive. It’s incredible to me that in this day and age, people are still incredulous that this is the case. I’m always happy to find articles like this, confirming that telecommuting really can work.

Facebook Gobbles 16 Billion Minutes of Your Time a Day
That’s straight from the mouth of Facebook systems engineer Tom Cook. Other factoids: The average user has 130 friends and creates 70 pieces of content each month. How do you compare? Me? I’m not telling. :)

A New Version Of Google Chrome Now Due Every Six Weeks
 Sounds crazy, but it actually makes loads of sense if your goal is a bug-free product: “The most important thing that Google highlights may be the easing of pressure off of their engineering team. Under the old, longer release model, engineers would be pressured into trying to finish new features before a deadline or risk having them cut and not showing up for months. With the new release schedule, even if something isn’t ready to go in one release, it will only be six weeks until it makes the next one.”

By: Josh Bixby Category: Ecommerce Tags: , ,
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