The current digital age should speed up your company, but 15 % is wasted of every hour you spend in front of your computer. What’s holding you up? The biggest issue is slow, faltering or even crashing systems. That gives you extra payroll costs and employee frustration.

Over 15 years ago several studies showed the uncomfortable truth: personal computers aren’t improving productivity. The naked truth was that nearly half the time spent on computer-related tasks was lost due to digital impediments. The issues faced by your users at that time were more widespread than initially thought, becoming persistent thorns in their sides.

This left Danish researchers at the University of Roskilde and the University of Copenhagen wondering: has much truly changed since then? Has technology's evolution and the chorus of user-friendliness claims from manufacturers made a substantial difference?

Their findings were published in the journal Transaction on Computer-Human Interaction by ACM (Association for Computer Machinery).

The Research Outcomes

The paper shows that when computers slow down and prohibit work tasks from being completed, this leads to lost work time and frustrations. Although improvements have been made to enhance the user experience, delays and frustrations remain high. The median rating for these frustrating instances stood at 7 out of a scale of 9. Interestingly, the researchers note that familiarity with computers has no effect.

The 234 participants were on average 28.6 years old; two-thirds were working professionals, and the other third were students. They spent 6 to 8 hours behind a computer on average, were experienced users and 83% used Windows (with the remaining working with Mac).

For the study, the participants had to log on for one hour on their computer and document their frustrations. They recorded instances when time was lost due to system hiccups, troubleshooting mishaps, or efforts to reclaim lost progress. Across the span of an hour, a third enjoyed a seamless experience, a little over half encountered frustrating roadblocks, 4% had two interruptions, and 3% three to seven disruptions. On average, the time loss ranged from 6.63 to 12.15 minutes, which encompasses 11% to 20% of their allotted time.

Caught in the Freeze

The most common frustration is a temporary system freeze, followed by a crash and no functionality. Frequent usability complaints include a glitch in the flow of activity and an input device stutter.

At Sciante we see that many systems operate far from their potential efficiency. Direct development and operation costs determine IT spending. That’s putting the cart before the horse because the true cost isn't in It itself, it’s in your employees waiting for your IT to do its job.

As the Danish study poses, 15% downtime wastes 15% of your payroll costs. On top of losing money, job satisfaction goes down, making it harder to hold on to your A-players. This tells you where the real costs lie. Application performance monitoring traces the cause of slow application systems. Our services see solutions even before the system starts to malfunction.