Abstract
When browsing online, there is considerable variation in the amount of time that one has to wait for content to appear once the link to that content has been activated (i.e., clicked). In two experiments we examined how ‘download time’–a potential barrier to information access–influences search behaviour. In both experiments, participants completed a video-watching task in which they were presented with a screen containing six clickable icons, each of which represented a unique video. When participants clicked an icon, a video would begin to load and then play. The participants’ task was to gain as much information from the videos as possible for a later memory test. Critically, however, the ‘download time’ (i.e., the time between the click on the icon and the video beginning to play) of the available videos in a given search session varied. In Experiment 1, these download times were 0 (instant), 2, or 30 seconds, and in Experiment 2, they were 5, 15, or 30 seconds. In general, we found that participants terminated and avoided videos with longer download times than videos with shorter download times. Interestingly, this effect was attenuated when the experienced download times were more similar to each other (Experiment 2) than when they were more different from each other (Experiment 1).
Highlights
People’s opinions, decisions and future plans depend on the information they consume
The tendency to 1) terminate/abort access during a download was measured via the proportion of terminated downloads, which was calculated as the number of videos that were terminated during the download time divided by the total number of videos that were queued to load
The tendency to 2) wait through a download was measured via the number of videos started, which was calculated as the number of videos that began to play after participants had waited through the download time
Summary
People’s opinions, decisions and future plans depend on the information they consume. Information consumption depends in part on what content is available (e.g., on the internet, in the library), the extent to which it is accessible [1,2], and the level to which people attend to the information they access [3,4]. Forming an opinion regarding the best earphones to purchase might depend on the availability of information about different earphones on the internet, the ability of the individual to find and access the relevant web pages, and the person’s level of attention when reading the earphone reviews he or she discovered online. Setting aside the important issues of information availability and the process of attending to selected material, here we focus on the issue of information access; and in our treatment of information access we further restrict our inquiry to the context of the World Wide Web, which is perhaps one of the fastest growing repositories of information on the planet.
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