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py of Web Users’ Waiting
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Chapter 11
Time
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The explosiver
expansion
of the World Wide Web (WWW) is the biggest event
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in the Internet.
Since its public introduction in 1991, the WWW has become
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an important channel for electronic commerce, information access, and
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publication. However, the long waiting time for accessing web pages has
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become a critical issue, especially with the popularity of multimedia I
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technology and the exponential increase in the number of Web users.o
Although
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various technologies and techniques have been implemented
to alleviate the
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a
situation and to comfort the impatient users, there e
is still the need to carry
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out fundamental research to investigate
what
constitutes
an acceptable
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h
g
waiting time for a typical WWW user.
yriThis research not only evaluates Nielsen’s
hypothesis of 15 secondso
asp
the maximum waiting time of WWW users, but
C distributions of waiting time of WWW users.
also provides approximate
Fiona Fui-Hoon Nah
University of Nebraska – Lincoln
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INTRODUCTION
The growth of the Internet is one of the most astonishing technological phenomena of the 21st century. One such growth is the explosive development of the
World Wide Web (WWW). The WWW is an Internet client-server hypertextdistributed system that originated from the CERN High-Energy Physics Laboratories in Geneva, Switzerland. Since its public introduction in 1991, the WWW
has become an important channel for electronic commerce, information access,
and publication. With exponential growth in the WWW market, the long waiting
Previously Published in Challenges of Information Technology Management in the 21st Century
edited by Mehdi Khosrow-Pour, Copyright © 2000, Idea Group Publishing.
This chapter appears in the book, Intelligent Support Systems: Knowledge Management by Vijayan
Sugumaran.
Copyright © 2002, IRM Press, an imprint of Idea Group Inc.
146
A Study of Web Users’ Waiting Time
time for accessing web pages has become a major problem for WWW users
(Lightner, Bose and Salvendy, 1996), especially with the increasing use of multimedia technology and the doubling of Internet users every 18-24 months. A survey conducted by the Graphic, Visualization, & Usability (GVU) Center at the
Georgia Institute of Technology also indicates long download time to be the biggest problem experienced by WWW users (GVU, 1998). This problem is so
noticeable that WWW users sometimes equate the “WWW” acronym with “World
Wide Wait”!
The WWW has been used for both business and personal purposes. It is used
not only by businesses to gain competitive advantage, but also by individuals and
groups to publish information in an electronic format for worldwide access. Any
individual, group, or organization can make its web pages available to the public.
Initially developed to provide scientists and researchers with an easy means of
sharing information, the WWW has become one of the world’s most widely used
environment for publishing information (Vacca, 1995). In addition, the WWW has
become one of the most popular information search tools. The wealth of information available on the WWW makes it an excellent information repository. It puts
global information at our finger tips and enables us to access it from the comfort of
our home. The WWW also provides an avenue for people to “kill time” by surfing
the net (Hayes, 1995).
Since its public introduction, the WWW has diffused rapidly to different geographical locations and to different age groups. Although initial use of the Internet
was dominated by technology developers/pioneers and early adopters/seekers of
technology, a study reveals that more older and younger users are becoming Web
literate (Pitkow and Kehoe, 1996). With this ever-increasing number of Web
users, access time of WWW has become a serious concern (Lightner et al., 1996).
The findings from the GVU’s (1998) 10th WWW User Survey indicate that the
top two problems faced by Web users are the long download time of web pages
(61.4%) and the long loading time of advertising banners (62.3%). The situation is
gradually worsened by the increasing and excessive use of multimedia data (i.e.,
audio and video clips). This problem affects both information users and authors
since users are less likely to visit websites requiring long access time (Reaux and
Carroll, 1997). Therefore, it is important to conduct research studies on WWW
access time, ways to reduce the access time, and ways to extend Web users’
waiting time.
Although technologies and techniques have been introduced to partly resolve
the problem and to ease the frustration of impatient users, fundamental research to
assess web users’ waiting time is lacking. This research attempts to investigate the
question, “What constitutes an acceptable waiting time for WWW users?”
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