[IxDA Discuss] "Acceptable" download/performance time on flash sites?

[Troy Gardner]

It's all about managing expectations, by default I consider 2-3
seconds of perceived waiting max, anything longer should be choose
your own adventure (e.g. low res, high fi) and or using bandwidth
detection to autoroute.

high experience is engaging the user in a seamless narrative and or
flow state. 'don't make me think'. Transitions properly used are
supposed to smooth over the annoying 'blink'/refresh of html apps, but
having to wait to download the transition is worse than the html
'blink!'.  It's not that hard to use something simple, fade to
white/black, slides, an already preloaded interstitial, a tear down
animation while the next piece is loading in.

ajax/html are no better or worse than flash in creating a rich
experience, though typically they are cheaper/faster to develop text
centric apps.  It's largely how well the interactive team timeslices
information, packaging it for streaming so that it's always preloading
in the background of engaging a user, and doing bandwidth detection to
route them to the appropriate experience.  Often due to the way
creative types get creative, this is much harder discipline than I
would like.

Troy