Gone in the Blink of an Eye!
Written by Rosalind Gardner on January 15, 2006 · Comments (4)
Filed Under Web Design ·
An article published over at Nature.com confirms that we humans DO generally judge books, and web sites, by their covers.
Basically, first-time visitors arriving from search engine will decide in only 50 milliseconds whether or not your site is worth their time.
Here’s what Michael Hopkin had to report:
“Like the look of our website? Whatever the answer (and hopefully it was yes), the chances are you made your mind up within the first twentieth of a second. A study by researchers in Canada has shown that the snap decisions Internet users make about the quality of a web page have a lasting impact on their opinions.
We all know that first impressions count, but this study shows that the brain can make flash judgements almost as fast as the eye can take in the information. The discovery came as a surprise to some experts. “My colleagues believed it would be impossible to really see anything in less than 500 milliseconds,” says Gitte Lindgaard of Carleton University in Ottawa, who has published the research in the journal Behaviour and Information Technology1. Instead they found that impressions were made in the first 50 milliseconds of viewing.”
So, does your site suffer from long load times? Sick colors? Graphic mania? It might be time to read more…
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Comments
4 Responses to “Gone in the Blink of an Eye!”
Scottydog on January 16th, 2006 19:49 pm
I do not competely agree with this article. I maintain two sites, fairwayhits.com and 4kidsnmom.com. Both of these sites are product driven, meaning, I have to display many graphics and descriptions. I do think sites should be clean, well organized and easy to navigate.
[Reply]
Rosalind Gardner on January 17th, 2006 11:37 am
Thanks for your comment, ScottyDog and I couldn’t agree more that sites should be “clean, well organized and easy to navigate”.
Separating out sites into categories relevant to the main theme, and then creating individual product pages really helps to eliminate the need to put all graphics on a homepage, for example.
Getting organized to create a clean uncluttered site that visitors will enjoy and is ’sticky’ requires some planning, but it certainly is doable.
Cheers,
Rosalind
[Reply]
nar321 on January 17th, 2006 17:15 pm
The main point I got was that people make up there minds quickly about wether to “surf a site” so keep to the point, no strange backgounds and create several sites if you want to sell several items.
[Reply]
David on January 20th, 2006 3:40 am
I wonder what the research really states. I’ve always tended to look for content above all else, because I’m always seeking information when I’m “browsing” the Internet. Page loading times are important, and there should not be a huge amount of graphics on the site. A clean and simple layout is best, I think. I don’t believe that my own judgement of a site is made within 20ms of my visit! It’s unlikely that I will bookmark a page on a site and return to it, although I will if it seems to have further content that will interest me. I don’t see how you can gather this information in 20ms.
[Reply]
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