On Mastodon, Alex Russell, a product architect who’s worked on Chrome and Edge, and has focused on tech standards for a while:

Once Upon A Time At Google, a team presented results that had confounded them: making the system load several times faster increased engagement somewhat, but in line with Tammy’s findings, engagement went way up for every 100ms improvement below the 1s threshold.

Going fast enough to become “dial tone” changed user behaviour and expectations in a hugely positive way for the product.

This sort of “no such thing as too fast until you prove it” lesson is everywhere.

Phrasing it as “no such thing as too fast” is really interesting, and not something I encountered before.

(The way I understand the “dial tone” remark is commenting on reliability of landline phones in the second half of last century. The landlines were extremely reliable and even came with their own power source; you could pick up the handset and the dial tone – the system’s confirmation it’s ready for you to dial – was inevitably and immediately always there, already waiting for you. There was never any delay when the phone had to get ready for you to call.)

Russell links to a report by Tammy Everts:

If you make websites for a living, stop what you’re doing and read this research by Tammy Everts; it shows what many of us have been saying for a long time: even if there is such a thing as “fast enough” (there isn’t), it’s generally much faster than you are targeting.

The report itself is perhaps too deep and jargony for this blog, but the TL; DR seems to be: Google suggests the time for the site to finish loading its largest piece is 2.5 seconds, and Everts argues and shows evidence that it’s a lot less.

I have before focused on “finger speed” – making sure the interactions operate at the “speed of flow,” which requires sweating speeds counted in milliseconds. Everts’s and Russell’s comments confirm that millisecond-speeds matter for other reasons, too.