Every six seconds of improvement in speed of service amounts to typically a 1% increase in sales. And it has a dramatic impact on the bottom line.
–John Ludutsky, President of Phase Research, quoted on the “Fast Food Tech” episode of Modern Marvels, aired 2007-12-29 on the History Channel.
I wouldn’t expect things to be much different in the software world. The faster you get your burger bits the better.
UPDATED: 2009-02-05:
Apparently people want service much faster from software. Greg Linden reports,
Half a second delay caused a 20% drop in traffic. Half a second delay killed user satisfaction.
This conclusion may be surprising — people notice a half second delay? — but we had a similar experience at Amazon.com. In A/B tests, we tried delaying the page in increments of 100 milliseconds and found that even very small delays would result in substantial and costly drops in revenue.
If the Mr Ludutsky’s figure is accurate, a 20% drop in fast-food revenue would require a two minute delay. Does this mean every second spent waiting on a computer is as bad as waiting 4 minutes in meatspace? I don’t know — I’m doing a lot of extrapolation from hearsay. But it’s something to consider.