How Do People Evaluate a Web Site's Credibility?

theduck writes "Ever suspected (or feared) that web users are mostly mindless sheep evaluating your website more by the eye candy than your carefully crafted content? Well, it appears you were right. A study resulting from a collaboration between Consumer Webwatch and The Stanford Pervasive technology Lab reports that even though consumers say that they look for content first when evaluating the credibility of a website, they actually focus primarily on design look and information design/structure (i.e. ease of navigation). Of course, the study's methodology might have something to do with the results..."

Comments

Mindless sheep

[jukal]

Of course, the study's methodology might have something to do with the results...

Yes, if you invite mindless sheep, it is quite likely that it is reflected in your results. In this case, it turns the whole study into a very good case of black humor :)) From here.

We began recruiting participants in May 2002 by contacting nonprofit groups, such as the Children's Brain Tumor Foundation, and offering a $5 donation for each supporter who completed the study

*** Why not read an analysis of the Slashdot Effect instead :))

NO FLASH

[spoonist]

Sites that do not use Flash get my Seal of Approval.

Very obvious

[tanveer1979]

Looks count. So if your webisite aint good to look at content can take a walk. This is a simple truth in this world. Suppose a merc looked Like Lada(that russian car you see in bond movies) I doubt if many people would pay the moolah.

Of course a pretty webpage is no excuse for bad content. Just looks will ensure that people visit your front page and dont really come back. For the invitation you need the eye candy, for the substance you need content. so you need balance.

However some webpages are all eyecandy and everything else is a pain. A proper balance is needed. A good example of balance is this site.

Then CNN is also an okay example though it gets a bit cluttered.

Sadly, most webdesigners use some invalid M$ only code in their website, and non windows ppl have a problem surfing. These guys realize that 95% of surfers wont mind the nonsense.
This is web democracy majority rules. Most sites which are coming up new are focusing all on eye candy.

You have other extremes too. Some people want to make it easy for lynx users, result, sites look good only in lynx! This is going too much over the board. IMHO a good site should have valid HTML, and simple valid javascript. Also a site map is a must. I really hate those sites with lots of clutter. Looking for info is like looking for a needle in a haystack. Perhaps if they put some good search engine on the front page. As far as that is concerned even /. is horrible. The search engine can take some serious work. Otherwise I just love it, its simple, has never crashed my browser and dosent take too much time to load.

Sus about the name

[LordLucless]

After three years of researching Web credibility, the Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab...

Persuasive Technology Lab sounds a bit ominous to me. I think the real agenda of this group is to come up with some sort of "persuadatron" a la Syndicate.
This "webpage design" survey was just a test run to see how many pointless sites they could "persuade" people into appreciating.

Re:Depends on the user

[chris___1]

agreed.

the "savvy user" is not hunting around the internet for scrolling marques or 150kb animated gifs - they want content and usability. a good web site should be able to stand alone, without needing endless "pretty" crap to keep the surfer interested.

google is one of the most visited sites on the internet, and what's on its home page? very little. it loads fast, is highly usable, and serves it's purpose excellently. there are very few sites on the internet that do this well.

i think most web designers realise this. most pages for the "savvy user" (slashdot being an example) are functional, and really cut through the crap. check out a web site for a less particular demographic (how about disney - oooh! pictures! sounds!), and the site design is certainly different.

and web design brings about another sore point - browser compatability. seeing as most of the world uses ie now, nobody seems to care about what the pages look like in different browsers. i'd never use netscape (personally, i use opera, but i wish they'd get their game together just so there'd be more variation in browsers. those responsible for making the browsers would have to stick to the standards more closely, which would lead to greater browser compatability for all sites (hopefully!).


chris.

WTF is credibility???

[Qbertino]

What's this talk about credibility???
I go for Sites that have quality!
www.bbspot.com, for example, looks like crap, but the humors great. If I want satire, I go there.
www.deviantart.com has near to zilch user communication exept from "Hey, great picture!" but the Art just plain rulez. If I want Art, I go there.
www.xfree.org looks like someone got paid to make an extra crappy website. But if I want to know more about xfree I'll have to take it.
www.nosepilot.com has exactly zero user interaction but is the ultimate flash-vector-animation joyride. I look at that movie twice a year. It has credibility for being one of the references in flash.
slashdot.org and journalisim are wide and far between, but they tend to talk about the stuff I'm interessted in - as far as 'picking interesting stuff' goes, I guess /. is credible. No?
Quit generalizing.
But yet again, expierience tells me that good looking sites tend to be good.

Re:Not that a good design is a bad thing.

[Reziac]

The most-common thing potential clients say to me right off is "I loved your site, it's so easy to get around in!"

THEN some go on to say they liked all the good information. But that's seldom their first remark.

this smacks of focus-group thinking...

[mlas]

While this study produced some food for thought, I will ingest it with a liberal amount of salt. Whenever you ask people about their comments on a site they just visited, you will invariably get a fair amount of what they think you want to hear. This is why focus groups are suspect; it's an interesting truism that people are bloody poor at articulating what they really want.

Even with 10 sites per category in several categories to choose from, it's doubtful that any of those sites have content people really want at the given moment. Without providing content that will satisfy a perceived need, of course people are going to respond more positively to the shiny, candy-like buttons...

The only way to really understand what makes people's web site experiences a satisfying one is to observe people as they surf, and watch their results. Good web design is more like gardening than anything else: plant the site, watch traffic grow, remove some weeds, water with fresh content, fertilize with fresh design. A good strategy is to post alternate designs often, and then watch your traffic logs to see if clickthroughs increase. Amazon, whatever your criticism of them, is great at this... their site changes features and layouts just about weekly. Not enough to make people lost, but menus move, contract, expand; buttons move from GIF to HTML and back; layouts widen and narrow. Then the proof is in the traffic, and the visitor never gets a chance to tell you what they think you want to hear.

I'm glad to hear the conclusion that good design has value (I'm primarily a designer), but I think this survey is an oversimplification of reality which leads to an oversimplified conclusion.

Re:Well duh!

[bjfogg]

Deep thinking is hard work, so most people avoid it whenever possible -- including on the web. The fact is that we humans are "cognitive misers."

Imagine if we were compelled to investigate everthing in depth, no matter how trivial. This compulsion would likely lead to mental illness or multiple graduate degrees (or even worse -- both!).

Re:Easy

[dtobias]

A few of my "turn-offs" that lower my estimate of the cluefulness (and hence credibility) of the site's developers:

• hardcoded-pixel-width tables instead of sites that gracefully adapt to any window width
• microscopic fonts for main body text
• pop-up ads (though since I've set Mozilla to reject them I don't actually notice which sites have them any more)
• notices telling me to "Get a Better Browser" or change my resolution, etc., to whatever their clueless developer prefers
• pointless splash pages before you get to the real content
• main site content or navigation that's nonfunctional without some feature not present or disableable in some browsers (JavaScript, Flash, PDF, sites opening pop-up windows to put all their main content in -- the latter often show as blank pages to me due to my Mozilla configuration to disable popups)
• stupid or careless title text for pages, like "Untitled Document" (it's amazing how many pages out there have this as their title), or just mindlessly replicating the site name alone as the title of all pages, or trying to spamdex keywords for search engines -- these things result in a useless and stupid-looking set of titles in the browser back-button history and when you bookmark a page in the site
• images with no ALT text
• images with stupid ALT text, showing a lack of understanding of the purpose of this attribute
• frames (almost any use of them)
• any use of A HREF="#" as a link; the "#" pseudo-URL seems to somehow be trendy as a dummy link element when developers are really using the anchor tag to hold JavaScript events; they should instead put a meaningful URL there for graceful-degrading purposes. At any rate, the JavaScript events should always end in "return false;" so that the URL isn't actually gone to; otherwise you get an unsightly jump to the top of the page and add another URL to the back-button history.
• any use of ".htm" as the extension for HTML documents instead of the more proper ".html" -- that's a dumbass Microsoftism dating from ancient and obsolete operating systems that couldn't take four-letter extensions. It's HyperText Markup *Language*, dammit.
• links back to the site's homepage, or to subdirectory default indices, using A HREF="index.html" or A HREF="subdir/index.html" (or other default name) instead of the more elegant and consistent use of the directory alone like A HREF="./" or A HREF="subdir/".
• links to subdirectories that omit the trailing slash, forcing an extra server redirect (NOTE: Both this and the preceding item cause links to show in the unvisited color even when you've already been there, due to the URL variation.)
• sites that muck around with the link colors so as to make visited and unvisited links the same color, thus suppressing a useful feature of the browser's interface
• sites that try to disable parts of the browser's controls, like the back button or the "Save As" feature, perhaps to "stop people from stealing their content".
• domain name abuse, like sites that are clearly noncommercial in nature but insist on using a .com address, or sites that are chapters or branches of parent entities but use stupid unnecessary domain names of their own instead of logical subdomains of the parent site, or sites that keep registering ridiculous flavor-of-the-month domain names for every last marketing gimmick they come up with, when it all could have been done perfectly well through the domain they already have.
• sites that have their own domain name but for some inscrutable reason use something stupid that's not in their own domain as their contact email address -- the use of (gag, vomit) aol.com addresses in this manner is somehow rampant.