Waiting for images

Users were vague as to how long they would wait for images to appear on a page. Several said it was relative to what they were used to. Typically, it was ``not very long''. One user had measured his tolerance and identified it as 15 secs. Other figures, where hazarded, stretched from a few seconds to a couple of minutes. Answering the question appeared difficult for most users: it was accompanied by long pauses, claims that it was a difficult question and one person watched a second go by on his watch before answering. There was also an implicit acknowledgement that patience varies from occasion to occasion.

Of course, context was a determining factor too: if users knew that they wanted to see the picture, then they would wait considerable longer than if they had no interest. And one pointed out that if she knew how long the wait was likely to be, she could plan round it.

Several other interesting behaviours were referred to:

• browsing as a background activity while doing something else
• browsing with more than one browsing window open so that multiple web activities could be conducted
• reading text as the rest of the page (ie images) downloads
• clicking on links in the text in the appearing page without waiting for the image to download (``clicking through pages'')

Despite these mechanisms to avoid waiting, frustration with slow downloading images was apparent. The reasons for this varied: for instance, there might be no interest in the particular image or there might be no interest in the page - given the exploratory nature of much web activity and the poor description of links, it was not surprising that several people said they wanted to see quickly if they had found something interesting or not. Reference was made to the cost of waiting for images, especially across a slow modem link.

There was consensus that, all other things being equal, they would prefer images that arrived in 2 seconds rather than half a minute.