Which UX guidelines exist for mobile app performance?

Question

I'm doing the UX for an app that communicates with bluetooth devices. Unfortunately, all bluetooth traffic is routed through our cloud backend which occasionally makes the app slow. To deal with this I would like to define some performance goals, for example "Response time for bluetooth actions should be less than 1000ms".

Instead of making up arbitrary performance goals myself I would like to base them on existing research or best practises. This would make it much easier for me to argue for spending time on improving performance.

• For web pages I found a model by google called RAIL that could perhaps be applicable in a mobile app too.

• I also found an article by Jacob Nielsen that discusses response time limits in general.

Are there any other UX guidelines, models or best practices that concerns performance in mobile apps?

Answer 1

There was a research done on that a couple of years ago.

Have a look here:

https://think.storage.googleapis.com/docs/mobile-page-speed-new-industry-benchmarks.pdf

One of the first things they mention is:

The average time it takes to fully load a mobile landing page is 22 seconds, according to a new analysis. Yet 53% of mobile site visitors leave a page that takes longer than three seconds to load.

Similar to the answer by RobC.

They also provide with a few fancy diagrams that show correlation between site performance and users conversion rate.

Hope this helps a little.

EDIT: Updated article on the topic (thanks to Kevin M.):

https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/marketing-resources/data-measurement/mobile-page-speed-new-industry-benchmarks/

Answer 2

The NNG website summarizes response times and need for feedback:

• Response Times: The 3 Important Limits

In summary, 0.1 seconds for the UI to feel instantaneous. From 0.1 to 1.0 seconds the UI will have a noticable delay. After 1.0 seconds the user will feel their work is being interrupted. This is independent of the technology used for the user interface (desktop, mobile, web).

Answer 3

Google puts the mark at 3 seconds or less. See https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/marketing-resources/data-measurement/mobile-page-speed-new-industry-benchmarks/

Most industry sites and apps exceed this limit, but it's worth shooting for, especially in the mobile context where anything less than an immediate response reads as broken.