2021/03/10 by Jess Hohenstein, Hohenstein, Jess, Bill Selman +7 · 2 voices
Arts and Humanities · Computer Science · Psychology · Social Sciences · #Affect (linguistics) #Computer science #Digital Marketing and Social Media #Impact of Technology on Adolescents #Media Influence and Health #Multimedia #Perception #Priming (agriculture) #Psychology #Quality (philosophy) #Reading (process) #Social Media and Politics #The Internet #Web browser #World Wide Web #cs.HC
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2103.06181
published in arXiv (Cornell University) (Cornell University) · 9 pages, 10 figures
arxiv created 2021/03/10 · openalex publication_date 2021/03/10 · arxiv updated 2021/03/11 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
With technical performance being similar for various web browsers, improving user perceived performance is integral to optimizing browser quality. We investigated the importance of priming, which has a well-documented ability to affect people's beliefs, on users' perceptions of web browser performance. We studied 1495 participants who read either an article about performance improvements to Mozilla Firefox, an article about user interface updates to Firefox, or an article about self-driving cars, and then watched video clips of browser tasks. As the priming effect would suggest, we found that reading articles about Firefox increased participants' perceived performance of Firefox over the most widely used web browser, Google Chrome. In addition, we found that article content mattered, as the article about performance improvements led to higher performance ratings than the article about UI updates. Our findings demonstrate how perceived performance can be improved without making technical improvements and that designers and developers must consider a wider picture when trying to improve user attitudes about technology.