Understanding the Impact of Visual Factors on the Experience of LoadingWeb Apps

The experience of loading Web Apps has gained a lot of attention from both academic researchers and industrial practitioners. State-of-the-art efforts mainly focus on reducing the metric of Page Loading Time (PLT), making the resources of Web Apps retrieved from the network and evaluated on the browser as soon as possible. However, our user study on comparing the experience of loading 1064 popular Web Apps shows that shorter PLT does not imply better experience in about 25% comparison pairs. Then, for the Web Apps in these pairs, we use seven visual metrics to measure the loading experience and find that visual factors dominate the experience. To this end, we summarize four optimising principles from the perspective of visual factors to improve the experience of loading Web Apps. These principles are easy to be adopted by Web App developers and can complement the efforts of reducing PLT.