What is the impact of TTI (time to interactive on retention/participation/sales?

You’ll find a lot of studies that say page load times matter a ton

But we ran an experiment at work and found it had almost no impact on our app

The problem is that these studies are generally talking about blogs or e-commerce sites

But when my boyfriend opens League of Legends it takes him several minutes to get into a game and he plays it all the time

Clearly there’s a difference due to intent/payoff/etc

If I’m looking for an answer to “what’s a good substitute for heavy cream” I’m not gonna wait 15 seconds for your website to load 50 ads

But I’ll sit there for several minutes waiting for a @chartio dashboard to run 50 massive queries I need for my job

In these scenarios I care way more about interactions. It would drive me nuts if I was typing in Google Docs and my keystrokes took even a couple frames too long to appear on screen

We have a tendency to paint the entire web with the same brush and completely ignore the differences between how users actually behave

It’s okay that an app that’s gonna be open on your computer all day has different priorities than a news website you land on from a tweet

That’s not to say we’re gonna bloat our app until it takes several minutes to launch. That’d obviously be a negative user experience and we don’t need a metric to tell us we should strive for good user experience

But if we’re focusing on growth, we know that there are more important things like making sure users are able to find something engaging, or making sure the app is friendly/accessible to them

Our TTI experiment:

300k new users on android per bucket

Control: 0s relative TTI
A: +0.5s (-0.04% retention)
B: +1s (-0.41%)
C: +2s (-0.25%)
D: +4s (-0.28%)

Those are *very* small differences compared to other experiments/improvements we could make

It's important to note that these are users that have already gone to the length of installing an app on their phone. It makes sense that they'd be willing to sit through a few more seconds of the app launching

And that's what I mean by a difference in intent/payoff