The Effect of Counterproductive Time on Online Task Completion

The objective of this study was to investigate how counterproductive time spent on a website affects consumers' online task completion. Two hundred and twenty-eight consumers were asked to perform a task on determined websites. Verbal protocols and clickstream data were collected. The results of Study 1 showed that the time spent waiting for pages to download had no effect on task completion, but that the time lost on pages that were useless to the task at hand had a negative impact on consumers' task completion. Study 2 indicated that the downloading time related to pages that were useful to consumers had no effect on task completion, but downloading times related to pages that were useless had a significant impact on task completion. Managerial and theoretical implications are discussed.