Loading time effects: A case study of Malaysian Examination Syndicate web portal

Internet has provided the venue for communication transformation, in which communication between different platforms and countries are made available through web applications. Therefore web application design plays an important role as users will be accessing the applications to obtain information. This results in guidelines establishment to assist in web application design. Malaysian government had emphasized the importance of such guideline and highlighted the importance of web rating. The star ratings were given to the sites that fulfilled certain criteria based on the guideline. However despite of having the guideline, most Malaysian web portals failed to achieve one important aspect which is the acceptable page loading time. This leads to user´s frustration as the page loading time exceeds their expectation. Based on literature analysis it was discovered that satisfying standard page loading time to attract user´s interest is three seconds. As such failing to load within three seconds will cause frustration among users when they access the web page. This particular issue needs to be addressed as it may result in web abandonment if it´s not resolved immediately. Hence work conducted will look at web page loading time and focused on government web portals that were given 5 stars rating using free online tools. The tools (WebSiteOptimization, WebPageTest and Pingdom Tools) used suggest possible causes of latency and what is lacked in related web portals in terms of page loading time performance. Result obtained were analyzed and grouped into main issues that contributed to slower page loading time. Solutions are proposed based on issues identified. Initial findings attained uncovered that web application design guideline had failed to include customers´ values. Therefore the second phase of work conducted had emphasized on customers values, focusing on value co-creation. Based on the values identified and issues discovered, new features which emphasized loadin- - g time aspects will be established through a web portal prototype. To further prove the established enhance guideline, Malaysian Examination Syndicate web portal is used as a case study. Results derived proved that the prototype developed differs from current web portal as it is developed to minimize page loading time in mind, and include users´ co-creation values and simultaneously fulfilling necessary criteria established in the guideline. This highlights the uniqueness of the work compared to previous approach used in designing web applications.