Comments on: Poor Web Design Alienates Customers

By: Jessica Pfund

Jessica Pfund — Wed, 18 Jan 2006 07:44:00 +0000

well, i suppose that makes sense, as a webpage basically looks the same after 450 ms / 450 minutes anyway.

Can you imagine if you had to read every page of that romance novel with the same picture of Fabio behind all the text… yeesh! you’d have made up your mind pretty quickly in too!

By: Jeff Warren

Jeff Warren — Wed, 18 Jan 2006 01:33:00 +0000

I was interested enough to look up the abstract…

“Three studies were conducted to ascertain how quickly people form an opinion about web page visual appeal. In the first study, participants twice rated the visual appeal of web homepages presented for 500 ms each. The second study replicated the first, but participants also rated each web page on seven specific design dimensions. Visual appeal was found to be closely related to most of these. Study 3 again replicated the 500 ms condition as well as adding a 50 ms condition using the same stimuli to determine whether the first impression may be interpreted as a â€˜mere exposure effectâ€™ (Zajonc 1980). Throughout, visual appeal ratings were highly correlated from one phase to the next as were the correlations between the 50 ms and 500 ms conditions. Thus, visual appeal can be assessed within 50 ms, suggesting that web designers have about 50 ms to make a good first impression.”

Link

By: Jeff Warren

Jeff Warren — Wed, 18 Jan 2006 01:27:00 +0000

“The researchers found that the speedily formed conclusions closely tallied with opinions of the websites that had been made after much longer periods of examination.”

They don’t say how much longer but there was a comparison.

By: Bob

Bob — Tue, 17 Jan 2006 20:10:00 +0000

An expert I know saw these results and mostly brushed them off—what the paper cites is consistency between a single person’s ratings at 50ms between trials. It doesn’t compare the difference between ratings at 50ms and 500ms, which would be more indicative of an early judgement influencing your later perceptions…

Don’t worry, you’ve still got at least a second or two until people can get to their back button =)

By: mike lin

mike lin — Tue, 17 Jan 2006 19:01:00 +0000

That’s an interesting comment… I guess that original saying stems from the fact that book cover design is hugely lacking.

My clear favorite are romance novel covers... An airbrushed Fabio should be enough to turn any reader away.

By: Dave Pitman

Dave Pitman — Tue, 17 Jan 2006 13:30:00 +0000

Perhaps one day I’ll be telling my kids not to judge a website by its front page…