Magic numbers
https://calendar.perfplanet.com/2018/magic-numbers/ [calendar.perfplanet.com]
2019-06-18 17:51
Guidelines like RAIL are popular in the web performance community. They often define time limits that must be respected, like 100ms for what feels instantaneous, or 1000ms for the limit of acceptable response time. Prominent people in the performance community keep telling us that there’s a lot of science behind those numbers.
Nielsen essentially takes some of the numbers from the Miller paper, brushes the dust of off them since they were pre-web and presents them in a simpler fashion that everyone understands, stating that they apply to the web. What Nielsen doesn’t do, however, is prove that those numbers are true with research of any kind. Jakob Nielsen is simply stating these limits as facts, but no science has been done to prove that they are true. And ever since, the entire web community has believed what a self-proclaimed expert said on the matter and turned it into guidelines. Surely, if an authoritative-looking man with glasses who holds a PhD in HCI states something very insistingly, it must be true.