The trade-off between latency and image quality: A user perspective

When developing systems that support QoS (Quality of Service), it is important not only to find technical solutions but also to explore how users perceive the type of service such systems can provide. This paper presents results from a study that explores how users select the trade-off between image quality and latency when downloading Web pages. The results show that many of the users in the study could accept a less than perfect image quality if the latency could be decreased. The difference in QoS requirements between Web pages and the large individual variations also suggest that the specification of the QoS should be made at the user level.