How to Discover Your Reaction Time – LoadStorm
How quick is your reaction time? To better comprehend the reality of what milliseconds are like, Human Benchmark has provided this simple tool to measure your reaction time. The test takes less than one minute. You are allowed five tries to measure your average reaction time.
Testing reaction time
How’d your test go? According to the site, the median reaction time is 215 milliseconds. When I took this test, my average response time was 272 milliseconds. As an avid gamer, I thought I’d be a little quicker. Outside of the Human Benchmark, a similar study from Scientific American, shows that our brains are living slightly in the past because our consciousness lags 80 milliseconds behind actual events. Overall, how does this relate to web performance?
In the world of web performance, speed isn’t just measured in seconds. When the milliseconds add up, they can be a deciding factor on whether website visitor will stay or leave your site. Akamai conducted a study about travel sites performance on consumers. They found that 57% of online shoppers will wait three seconds or less before abandoning the site. By looking a little deeper into the scope of how important milliseconds are, Amazon found that its revenue increased by 1% for every 100 milliseconds of improvement. Amazon’s third quarter revenue last year was $17.09 billion. 1% of that is almost $171 million. Even if it’s just 100 milliseconds, the difference can make a huge impact on a company’s financial success.
Now that we have a hands on understanding of milliseconds and its value, here are a few interesting facts:
- A single wing flap of a hummingbird, takes 20 milliseconds on average.
- The blink of an eye typically lasts 300-400 milliseconds.
- It takes 434.2 milliseconds for a 95 MPH fastball to reach home plate.