How long are your respondents prepared to wait for the survey pages to load?
posted by: Ole Andresen on 7/27/2010
The last year I've been trying to adjust my online habits to increase productivity, to cope with an ever-increasing workload. These are difficult patterns to break, but I have made some progress. A major focus for me is trying to reduce the amount of multi-tasking I do, so I now try to process emails in bulk instead of opening them as they come in, and have turned off all sorts of alerts (email, twitter etc.) to allow me to have periods of the work day (or evening) when I concentrate on one project only.
But one thing will still trigger me to start on a different task: Waiting. Waiting for an application to open. Waiting for a web page to load. I don't like waiting. It makes me feel unproductive. And it bores me. So that's when I jump over to something different, and, too often I guess, I forget what I was really trying to do. So at some point later when I get back to that application or page, I may have forgotten what I was about to do, or I may find that it is not a priority anymore and just close it.
Maybe this is a result of nearly 20 years of exposure to the internet. In 2002 BBC News reported that "the addictive nature of web browsing can leave you with an attention span of nine seconds - the same as a goldfish." More recently, author Nick Carr claims that the web is making us shallow. I, like others, don't quite buy into the notion that the web makes us stupid or unable to concentrate over time. But I do agree that we are likely to switch to something else much sooner now than before if we don't find it interesting enough, and I think we are more likely to give up or move to something else if it takes too much time to wait for something to open.
And indeed, as shown in these graphs from the Velocity conference, there is a clear relationship between landing page speed, bounce rate and pages viewed per visit. These statistics are for web sites. I think that the tolerance for slow web pages is much lower for online surveys than for web sites.
Kees de Jong had a very good article in the June edition of Research World on respondent engagement, where he talks about the most important factor to increase respondent engagement and fight declining response rates on online surveys: Questionnaire length. ("It's the length, stupid!")
I think page speed for online surveys is a very important factor in a respondent's perception of the questionnaire length and can have a very negative effect on the survey experience and consequently, response rates. I believe many respondents will behave just as I and switch to something different if they have to wait for pages to load. From the first page and onwards the survey pages have to be delivered quickly.
How long do you think your respondents are prepared to wait for survey pages to load? 1 second? 2 seconds? 3 seconds? More?