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This paper explores the possibility of identifying critical temporal performance targets for applications, and of designing Web-based solutions in terms of these targets. It offers some examples of such applications, including airline reservation, medical record-keeping and calendar maintenance. It concludes with some remarks on particular problems of porting applications from one platform to another, and how porting to the Web might affect performance in terms of critical parameters.
The reported study involved a survey of web users. A web-based questionnaire was created which comprised evaluation criteria selected from a large set of candidates using sorting techniques. The sorting exercise ascertained that delay was regarded as important by users, although issues of navigation and web page design are still dominant. However, the survey revealed that delays provoked criticism from users, although such delays appear to be acceptable for more local web sites.
This paper describes some observations of compensatory actions taken by users when response time on the University network and the World Wide Web were severely limited. A variety of techniques employed by users, grouped into two classifications are discussed and observations are made. Proposals for a full experiment are suggested to follow up initial findings.
This paper addresses the questions: what are users' requirements for acceptable timing in interaction with Web browser software; how are these requirements identified and how can they be satisfied in interface design? It reports on attempts to apply findings in the psychology of time to an analysis of users' temporal requirements for usable interaction with the Web.
This talk will argue that retrieval delays affect user's perceptions of the utility or value of information. It follows from this that utility curves, developed in the field of micro economics, can be used to analyse effective strategies for minimising the perceived costs associated with distributed information retrieval.
The paper present a proposal for a new approach to the public WWW files caching, with the aim to heavily reduce their access latency. It introduces a cache domain as a neighbourhood for file accesses and it alternatively contains a migration scheme for copies. It is fully aware of the DNS structure, it adapts well to the present resource deployment within Internet and it is fully user transparent.
Experiences in the use of the internet as a delivery medium for multimedia-based applications have revealed serious deficiencies in the ability of the communications medium to provide a data transmission service of sufficient quality, with consequential impact on the overall service quality experienced by users of the applications. This paper discusses the particular characteristics of multimedia traffic which make service provision so difficult; examines current proposals to develop a relationship between user perceptions of quality and the factors which must be addressed by the service provider to deliver an acceptable level of service.
Panel session presentation
This is a brief introduction to GMD's BSCW Shared Workspace system with an emphasis on lessons learned, temporal/performance issues experienced with earlier system versions and solutions as implemented in later system versions. Extrapolating from the BSCW experiences come some general issues and questions concerning temporal issues with the Web and Web-based systems.
Panel session presentation
EPSRC has two roles with respect to the World Wide Web: we are users, both as a publicity vehicle for our own programmes and as an information source; we are also a potential source of research funding for academics with an interest in the Web. However, there is a dearth of quality research applications to EPSRC with those that come mainly focused on short term problems rather than fundamental issues.
