Poor Web Design Alienates Customers
January 17th, 2006
On our WebDesign page, we mention one of our design principles, which we call the 10 Second Rule. Essentially we propose that “you have 10 seconds to convince a visitor that they want to hear more… if you can’t hold their attention for longer than 10 seconds, you’ve already lost.” According to a recent study at Carleton University in Ottawa, that may be a gross overestimate. Apparently subjects formed opinions about the quality of a website in the first 50 milliseconds, which were consistent with longer assessments, and even lasted long enough to affect the viewer’s opinion of the site’s content, such as products and services.
Study: Poor Web Design Alienates Customers (TechNewsWorld)
First impressions count for web (BBC News) (PDF)
Popularity: 2% [?]
January 17th, 2006 at 5:30 am
Perhaps one day I’ll be telling my kids not to judge a website by its front page…
January 17th, 2006 at 11:01 am
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.
January 17th, 2006 at 12:10 pm
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 =)
January 17th, 2006 at 5:27 pm
“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.
January 17th, 2006 at 5:33 pm
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 ‘mere exposure effect’ (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
January 17th, 2006 at 11:44 pm
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!