I recently wrote a blog post on the Appneta Blog about client side latency for users on the web.

So while the effects of poor performance is obvious, it makes one wonder about the relationship between client latency and the “perception of speed”. After all, the user can trigger many state change events (page load, submit a form, interact with a visualization, etc) and all these events have an associated latency to the client. However, are certain types of latency more noticable to the user then others?

This is an area that web developers need to think about closely, and it’s important because it could have an impact on your user engagement and user experience.