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September 10, 2003
Page weight paradox
Well, I'm back in town and trying to catch up! I'm sorry I couldn't accept Joe's invite to catch some blues on Friday (gotta love the blues!), but Saturday was our big day and I was being a good do bee and staying close to home. Two funny comments from the audience at the panel: first, there was the 81-year-old lady who wanted a simple word processor and who once "had a big Wang" (and had visited their headquarters in the 80s). There was also the gentleman whose son had tried to entice him into fantasy football at ESPN.com...after much frustration, he told his son to "go play with himself, just as he'd done all his life." Seriously though, the audience at the session shared some very legitimate complaints, and Don Norman shared their pain...and their responsibility. He noted that, to some extent, it was our insistence on new features that was one of the factors that led to horribly complicated software. (Lucky for us, Don decided that he'd rather do dinner wiith a bunch of web geeks rather than Jay Leno...go figure!). One thing that I'm really curious about is that the panel didn't hear about page weight as an issue. You hear that keeping pages light is important, because so many people aren't doing broadband (one estimate has nearly two-thirds of homes in the US connecting at 56K or less). So how do these page weights fit into this equation?
According to WebSiteOptimization.com (thanks to LOGos for the pointer), it would take your average 56K modem user (who probably gets 33K in throughput) over 90 seconds to download the USA Today home page! But they aren't the only ones with the heavy home page. I don't know if some of these "heavy sites" use sniffers to serve up heavier pages if they sense a fast connection, but I find these page weights coupled with the still fairly wide use of dial-up somewhat mind-boggling. Are all these folks with dial-up surfing a different web than those of us with broadband are? Are they just used to clicking on text links long before the graphics appear? Who would wait a minute and a half to see a site's home page?
Comments
USA Today took 40 seconds on my 56k dial-up. 90 seconds sounds like a long shot. After observing folks using dial-up, I can say that some people simply don't wait for the entire page to load before they start reading/scolling/clicking and some people are just so used to their slow connection that they've developed a great amount of patience. -- Posted by Joshua Kaufman on September 11, 2003 10:08 PMHi, thanks for the mention. Yes, fat pages are a big problem on the Web, even for broadband users. We did a survey of news sites, and they averaged over 145K total. You want your pages to load as quickly as possible, and 25-30K max is a good goal to shoot for. CNET is good with slim pages btw. -- Posted by Andy King on November 10, 2003 03:46 PM
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IDblog is Beth Mazur tilting at power law windmills. A little bit Internet, a little bit technology, a little bit society, and a lot about designing useful information products. Send your cards and letters to .
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