Auto-refresh. It's simple to add to a page and if the content of the page is updated constantly, your visitors automatically see the latest information available without having to refresh the screen, themselves. It sounds great on paper. But on a website, this seemingly tiny little feature packs a huge, negative impact. It never works in practical application, it can get very expensive, it can cripple a heavily used site and it always antogonizes the people who actively use your site -- the people you're striving to serve and keep, because they generate your income.
As an example, let's say your site is an automobile auction site. On the front page are lines of the latest auction listings -- year, make, model, color and a few descriptive words - each of these lines is linked to a page where bidders can read more about the vehicle, review the seller's auction terms and place a bid.
Let's also say that I'm a used car dealer. I'm a busy, successful person and I use your site, from my dealership, on a daily basis, to conduct my wholesale operations. I do this during normal business hours, while I'm also conducting my off-line retail operation. I use your site to auction off vehicles I've taken in on trade that are in low demand with my customers and to buy vehicles that are in high demand with my customers.
You know from my member profile and the member profiles of your other reliable income generators, that we're all used car dealers. (This would be true of this particular example because private consumers are subject to strict limits on the number of vehicles they can sell in a year.) Combined, we generate the larger portion of your income. You decide to reward us with a feature tailored to our needs, on the hopes that it will also attract more of us to your service. You know from your market research that car dealers are very busy, very impatient people who stay on top of our markets. So, you decide a good reward feature, that is inexpensive, simple and quick to incorporate into your system, is an auto refresh of the latest listings. Sounds like a perfect match. Right? Wrong!
If I'm about to click on the listing of a car I'm serious about bidding on... it may have taken me several minutes to study the listings in front of me to decide which listings match my needs or I may have had to take my attention away from the screen for a few minutes to attend to my retail business.
If I either start to move my mouse to make the click OR I return to my screen to make the click, only to find that the page is refreshing or has refreshed in my absence and that there have been enough new listings added since I loaded the page that I can no longer find the listing I was looking at, because it has scrolled to another page... I'm going to be frustrated and/or angry... my valuable time has just been wasted and I'm probably going to log off, because I'm a busy person who doesn't have time to hunt for this listing again... especially if there's a chance it will refresh off the screen again as soon as I do find it.
If this happens to me more than once in a blue moon -- and the more popular your site is, the more likely it is to happen with regularity -- I'm going to stop using your service.
Part of the value in using your site, is that it saves time compared to using off-line auto auctions and wholesalers -- if it costs me time, I may as well go duke it out with other dealers at the off-line auction lane every other week... where I can at least get a bid in edgewise.
By contrast, the visitor who has time to sit on the page, whether it's a consumer or another auto dealer -- you saved him the split second it would have taken him to click his mouse when he finished reading the listings on the page. You'll keep him.... unless he stops staring at the listings or leaving your site up without paying attention to it and starts really reading and trying to use the listings.
...And it's not just buyers who are going to be antogonized by this feature.
As a regular seller on your site, I don't want my listings scrolling off the page until a potential buyer has already looked at my listing, considered it and conciously decided against clicking on it. I don't want that decision made for him by an auto-refresh taking it off the screen. One of those visitors who hadn't made it to my listing, yet, or had just come to it when the screen refreshed might have bid on it and I might have gotten a better price for my vehicle, generating even more income for you.
A massive auto-refresh is also a HUGE server load that slows the entire site -- depending how many people are viewing the latest listings, it has the potential to slow the entire site to a crawl or even a halt. If you auto-refresh the screens of every person who's looking at the page, it affects everyone except the visitor who is just staring at that page or who's left the screen up, but is no longer looking at it.
Everyone who's actively using your site for its intended purposes will be affected... that's everyone listing a vehicle for auction, filling out a member profile, running a search of the listings, signing up for a new membership, submitting a bid, etc. In other words, by adding this feature, you tilt your site's "user friendliness" to the favor of visitors who aren't actively using your site at the expense of the visitors who are generating your company's income!
It's likely you invest heavily in growing your business by attracting new visitors and encouraging heavier use by existing members to increase your revenues. As you grow, your servers have to keep up with that growth. Whether your servers are in-house or you use a third party managed hosting service, accomodating additional server load and bandwidth usage is neither free nor cheap. The additional costs generated from just a simple auto-refresh can add up very quickly... the more traffic your site gets, the higher the costs soar. These expenses take away from other areas of your budget... like marketing and software development!
Refreshng a screen is easy, quick and intuitive for your visitors. They'll refresh the screen, on their own, when they're ready to do it. It's a routine part of using any web page that displays frequently updated information and anyone familiar enough with a web browser to use any site, successfully, knows how and why to refresh a page. If you want to offer your visitors a user-friendly way to refresh a screen, include the navigation button/link for that page in the navigation bar(s) and/or provide a "refresh this page" button. This is a perfectly acceptable design principle for pages with content that updates frequently.
