The Need for Speed: measuring the
importance of
loading times
Does time fly, or does time stand still?
Basis used innovative new approaches, cutting-edge tech, and a solid grounding in temporal illusions to answer a profound research question for Google.
Challenge
How important is speed? At least as far as mobile websites go, we can guess it’s pretty important. People are impatient, distractible, and often multi-tasking – mobile web pages need to work hard to keep up.
But Google wanted to quantify the importance of speed on the mobile web. A knotty, harder-than-it-first-appears research challenge, because how people perceive time isn’t constant: sometimes it flies, and sometimes it stands still.
From Vierodt’s law to the Kappa effect, there’s a wealth of academic literature on temporal illusions, and the disconnect between the objective passage of time and our subjective experience of it. To fully understand the importance of speed, we knew we needed an accurate measure of both.
Approach
To get to the answer, we designed an innovative, cutting-edge approach:
Passively monitoring organic mobile web behaviour across a quant-scale sample
Building out the technical capabilities to measure actual loading speeds when relevant sites were visited
Collecting in-the-moment survey data immediately after each visit, to measure perceptions about the loading experience
We were able to directly compare the real, empirically-observed experience of time (the actual loading speeds of a web page) with human perception of it (survey data on how quickly the web page was perceived to have loaded, and the resulting attitudinal and behavioural outcomes).
Impact
The research delivered a real splash, which was one the chief objectives for Google:
More than 2,000 people have been trained on the findings and implications, both inside and outside of Google
Videos documenting the research have generated more than 30,000 views
White papers and articles featuring the research have also been viewed more than 30,000 times
Most importantly, through the application of a considered, bespoke research design and innovative, cutting-edge research technology it provided an intelligent answer to an open, nebulous question: how important is speed, really?
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