🚀 go-pugleaf

I believe that the reason you haven't found any authoritative answer is
that there is none.  The general consensus is that willingness to wait is
probably an exponential distribution, but that the parameters depend on a
myriad of things.  Anecdotally, I know I'm much more willing to wait when
(a) I'm looking for specific information on a page rather than just
browsing, (b) I'm fairly sure that this site has the information I want,
(c) I know that I'm on a slow link or have other reasons to understand why
the page is taking a long time to load, (d) I get some feedback such as a
partial page, even though I may have to wait for the rest of the page to
download, (e) other pages that are relevant (either that contain similar
info or that I've recently surfed) are also taking a long time, (f) etc.

Note in particular that any study that quotes you a single number like 10s
is grossly oversimplifying the issue.  Is that 10s before half of your
potential customers give up, or 10%, or what?

Since this list is mostly librarians interested in information-rich pages
rather than marketing people, the information seeking behavior of surfers
is particularly relevant to us, and produces some surprising results.  For
example, take a look at the research done by UIE (Jared Spool's company)
<http://www.uie.com>.  They get all sorts of counterintuitive results, e.g.
that links at the end of a long page have greater salience than links at
the beginning.  Their paradigmatic task sets Ss to seek for particular
information on a web site, so it's the kind of task that you may find
especially relevant.

JQ Johnson                      office: 115F Knight Library
Academic Education Coordinator  email: jqj@darkwing.uoregon.edu
1299 University of Oregon       phone: 1-541-346-1746  -3485 fax
Eugene, OR  97403-1299          http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~jqj/