Global tablet users' study reveals high web experience expectations key for conversion

Global tablet users' study reveals high web experience expectations key for conversion

A new study has revealed that that tablet users have high expectations for web experiences and a third are less likely to make purchases online from companies that don’t meet those expectations.

Published last week by IT performance monitoring vendor Compuware, the study questioned 2,000 tablet PC users from across the world about their web experience expectations. Shaped by increasingly powerful PCs with fast, wired networks, the vendor said tablet users expect websites and transactions to work flawlessly.

It also found that four out of ten of those questioned had experienced a problem when accessing websites. Among those, two-thirds reported slow load times and more than four out of ten experienced website crashes or problems with website functions.

Affecting the bottom line

Almost 70% of tablet users expected websites to load in two seconds or less. And, if it did not, nearly half said they would retry a website only once or twice before abandoning their attempt to connect to it.

Among those who said they had experienced a problem, slow load times were the most frequently cited issue among two thirds (66%), followed by site crashes (44%), problems with site functions (42%) and issues with site format (40%).

Moreover, the survey respondents said a bad website experience would also drive 46% to competitive website, while 35% were less likely to visit the problematic website on any platform and 33% were less likely to purchase from that company.

Steve Tack, chief technology officer of Compuware application performance management (APM) platform Gomez, said the survey results showed that companies are not meeting tablet users’ web experience expectations.

"Tablet users represent a coveted audience that in general tends to spend more per order, so organisations that ignore tablet users do so at their own peril," he warned.