The headline of this article may seem a bit exaggerated, but you would be surprised to know what happens in our brain when a video takes time to load.
In recent years, studies related to neuroscience and smartphones have become more and more common. This time, the company has been Ericcson who has conducted a study to examine the effects that waiting in loading videos on stress levels. This study has been published in its latest Mobility Report, and has received 30 volunteers aged between 18 and 52 years old in the city of Copenhagen.
To carry out this study , all volunteers were equipped with eye-tracking glasses, blood pressure monitors, brain electrodes, and pulse meters. Once their vital signs had been monitored, each of the volunteers was given an Ericcson mobile phone connected to a 3G network and asked to carry out a total of 18 tasks in a period of 20 minutes. The tasks ranged from browsing news pages, you do searches with the most common search engines and watch videos. The videos had predetermined loading delays in order to measure the response of the volunteers.
The evaluation meter was the cognitive load, a stress meter that indicates the amount of resources the brain requires to perform a task (and that is reflected in the amount of activity of the prefrontal cortex). Cognitive load levels are measured in values from 0 to 1. A brain response up to 0.7 is considered normal, from that value we would be talking about a stressful situation. The levels significantly exceeded 0.7 when it came to video upload delays.
Stress levels increased 13% for the simple act of watching a video, but increased 3% more with just two minutes of waiting on the load and up to 6% more if the delay increases up to 6 seconds. But where the increase in stress became most notable was in the dreaded buffering, the pauses during the video broadcast, where stress peaks could reach up to 34%, levels that even exceed those that can be experienced during a exam or while watching a horror movie.
Another effect of the delay in the loading of videos, in addition to the increase in stress levels in users, is the bad perception that they may have of the operating company with which they have contracted their 3G, 4G networks , or WiFi. Medium delays in video uploads caused the user to feel dissatisfied with their service provider and consequently, want to change providers. If we talk about delays of longer duration, the user's perception of the brand worsens considerably. In the same way, the satisfaction index of a user towards their provider increases up to 4.5 points in a user experience free of loading delays.
