One big one or several small???

["Susan W. Gallagher" <sgallagher -at- EXPERSOFT -dot- COM>]

At 09:06 AM 11/6/97 -0600, Walker, Arlen P wrote:
>      The Laura LeMay books I have say that people don't like to scroll, so
>      the best passage length is that which fits on a single screen.
>
>This is a piece of oft-repeated wisdom that I'd like to see tested and
>explained more fully.
>
>Given:
>
>A) Three pages...
>
>B) One page with the same...
>
[snip]
>
>Advantage A: the next page begins at an easily recognizable location, while
>B might require a little lost time to re-orient yourself.
>
>Advantage B: jumping to next piece of information is faster than with A...
>
>The accepted wisdom is that A is better than B, but I need more than that,
>I'm looking for a coherent explanation of why this is the case?

Arlen,

One compelling reason for using one long page rather than three small
ones is response time. Here's a quote from Jakob Nielson's web site:

*************begin included quote****************
0.1 second is about the limit for having the user feel that the system is
reacting instantaneously, meaning that no special feedback is necessary
except to display the result.

1.0 second is about the limit for the user's flow of thought to stay
uninterrupted, even though the user will notice the delay. Normally,
no special feedback is necessary during delays of more than 0.1 but
less than 1.0 second, but the user does lose the feeling of operating
directly on the data.

10 seconds is about the limit for keeping the user's attention focused
on the dialogue. For longer delays, users will want to perform other tasks
while waiting for the computer to finish, so they should be given feedback
indicating when the computer expects to be done. Feedback during the delay
is especially important if the response time is likely to be highly variable,
since users will then not know what to expect.

*************end included article*****************

You can view the entire article at:
        http://www.useit.com/papers/responsetime.html

There's an Alertbox article that specifically addresses Web response times
at:
        http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9703a.html

Clearly, if an uninterrupted flow of thought is important, one long page
is better than several smaller ones -- particularly if the information
is to be accessed over the Internet rather than over an intranet or
locally.

HTH!


-Sue Gallagher               http://pw1.netcom.com/~gscale/susanwg/
sgallagher -at- expersoft -dot- com     http://www.expersoft.com

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