Mobile Web Speed
From MobileDesign
For now, this is just a list of links and stuff from the blog entry. Let's work on it.
[edit] Success Changes Perception of Speed
Before we get too focused on speed, speed, speed, consider some fascinating research by User Interface Engineering titled The Truth About Download Time. Don't get wound up in the age of the research; the conclusions are still true.
There are two paragraphs you really need to read:
When we looked at the actual download speeds of the sites we tested, we found that there was no correlation between these and the perceived speeds reported by our users. About.com, rated slowest by our users, was actually the fastest site (average: 8 seconds). Amazon.com, rated as one of the fastest sites by users, was really the slowest (average: 36 seconds).
There was still another surprising finding from our study: a strong correlation between perceived download time and whether users successfully completed their tasks on a site. There was, however, no correlation between actual download time and task success, causing us to discard our original hypothesis. It seems that, when people accomplish what they set out to do on a site, they perceive that site to be fast.
So. Perceived speed is not the same as actual speed.
[edit] Falsifying Speed Cues
I know of no actual research on this, because I think any that exists is secret maybe. I have heard numbers, but only secondhand, from browser makers, verbally.
Decisions have to be made during design of a browser, as to when to wipe out a page and start loading a new page; there's no one-true-method of doing this that follows naturally from computational science. These decisions effect the perception of browser speed (a lot) and in non-obvious ways. For example, browsers tend to grab a bunch of the page before they bother to show any. This way, the page loading phase can be made to seem very fast. The total time from click to finished-loading is no different, but the perception is very different.
[edit] Tips for Content Providers
And of course W3C Mobile Web Best Practices are useful.
