DISCLAIMER: All of the rambling you are about to read is based on my own
experience designing user interfaces, and none of it is based on industry
standards. In other words, get your grains of salt ready.
I think that it depends what page is loading, and how it all fits into the
user experience. Generally, I do everything I can to trim page times down,
and I get really anxious when processing approaches one second. That said,
some pages take longer. That's when the context of user experience becomes
important, in my eyes.
Some examples within my personal experience:
1) I am browsing around a site to try to find something. I don't know where
it is, exactly, so I have to try a bunch of different options. If all of
the options along the way are a bit slow (let's say 2-5 seconds each), my
brain starts to smoke and I go elsewhere if possible.
2) I browse around a site with quick loading pages, and then get to the tool
that is clearly what I want. Let's say it searches some database for hat
sizes of celebrities. Perfect! I want to know what size hat to buy John
Cleese for his birthday. I enter John in the first name field, Cleese in
the last name field, and wait 43 seconds for the query to load. My brain
does not start to smoke.
This is an expansion on what I feel to be the hole in the old
three-clicks-maximum rule. If I have a certain sense that I am going toward
what I want, I don't care how many clicks it takes; if, on the other hand, I
have to wander around a lot and pick with only partial certainty from the
links at any given level...brain smoke. It's the same with time, in my
eyes.
The other issue, I think, is frequency of page use. I don't care that
running an advanced find of every message in my Outlook mailbox takes a long
time: it gets the job done in the infrequent cases where I need to run such
a search. But when the Exchange server bogs down and opening new e-mails
gets slow (even by a half a second)...brain smoke.
HTH,
Matthieu
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