Tablet Users Find Bad User Experience on Websites Unacceptable

19 March 2012

Ben Logan

Director

Passionate about improving services and experiences for the people that use them.

A global survey of 2,000 tablet users by application performance management company Compuware has revealed that as many as 40% of websites crash or present glitches when accessed by these devices.

These findings are significant because the study also showed that tablet owners have high expectations when it comes to their web experiences, and a third are less likely to make purchases online from companies that don’t meet those expectations.

In other words, companies are losing out on a great deal of sales potential through having a poor website user experience for tablets. Usability issues such as shaky loading times, bad navigation functionality and issues when carrying out transactions are something that tablet users are not willing to put up with.

A total of 46% of the survey respondents said a poor website experience would drive them to a competitor website, with 35% also less likely to visit the problematic website on any platform thereafter.

In addition, nearly 70% of tablet users expect a web site to load in two seconds or less, and nearly half of tablet users will retry a web site only once or twice if it did not work initially.

CTO of Compuware APM, Steve Tack, commented: “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.”