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Our company has a field office that is dealing with high latency and low bandwidth issues when working with our document management system. I've been asked by the users in that office to solve this issue with the purchase of an add on which will dramatically reduce the page weight and improve the response time of the system.

Assuming that I can reduce the response time by 75%, I still need to justify that improvement is worth X amount of dollars.

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Is there any type of study or accepted measurement around the improvement of response time on a page equallying higher productivity by the end user?

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This has been studied quite exhaustively - This page links to most of the studies and results: http://www.websiteoptimization.com/speed/tweak/psychology-web-performance/

As for how that equates to revenue or productivity in your particular case, you would need to run some studies of your own - probably using multi-variant testing to measure the impact of slower pages in terms of productivity and revenue in your business setting.

For budgetary requests it might be worth citing some of the articles and studies linked above and suggest that you optimise a few pages and run multi-variant testing on those pages (new v old) to quantify the change.

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  • I would add that if you can distract users with something (meaningful) to look at, they perceive shorter wait times. In addition to actually reducing wait time, you can ensure parts of the content load immediately—maybe from a local file left behind during the last session. Even if that content is slightly stale, any (meaningful) time users spend on orienting themselves, on wayfinding, or on recognising details of their previous session will reduce the perceived wait time. So that might be an alternative to the spending you need to justify.
    – JeromeR
    Jul 8, 2015 at 23:51
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    @JeromeR, Yes, completely! This is also covered in the article I linked to above.
    – Roux Martin
    Jul 9, 2015 at 8:16
  • Are there any more recent studies? The link you posted cites studies more than 10 years old.
    – Pier
    May 11, 2020 at 5:12
  • @Pier I haven't looked at this for almost 5 years although I believe the psychology involved is still relevant. Please do share here if you find anything more up to date though.
    – Roux Martin
    May 20, 2020 at 13:02
  • @JeromeR I'd love to see evidence surrounding this and the resulting impact. I feel like I get more upset with skeleton screens and janky interfaces from partial loads than I do with empty white screens that eventually finish in the same amount of itme.
    – Charlie
    Nov 30, 2022 at 17:48

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