Information Search on the Web: Understanding the Impact of Response Time Delays with Information Foraging Theory

Delays are among the most frequently cited complaints of Web users. Long delays often cause users to abandon their searches, but do tolerable delays affect information search behavior? Intuitively, we would expect that delays should induce decreased information search. Prior research in non-Web environments shows that as delay increases, decision-makers tend to minimize effort by reducing information search and let decision quality slip. In contrast, information foraging theory suggests that decision makers in multi-page environments such as the Web would react to by searching more within each Web page. We conducted two experiments and, consistent with information foraging theory, we found that modest delays induced increased within-page information search but decreased between-page search; that is, tolerable delays increased the depth of search but decreased the breadth of search. In other words, tolerable delays, those that are noticeable but not long enough to cause the abandonment of search, will increase the “stickiness” of Web pages such that users will examine more information on each page before moving to new pages. The net impact of tolerable delays was counter intuitive: tolerable delays had no impact on the total amount of data searched in the first experiment, but induced users to examine more data points in total in the second experiment. Interestingly, there were no impacts on decision time, perceived effort or decision quality.