Web Users Judge Sites Instantly

Ant writes "This Nature.com news article reports that potential readers can make snap decisions in just 50 milliseconds: 'Like the look of our website? Whatever the answer, 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...'"

Comments

Duh

[Lord_Dweomer]

Well, let me be the first to say "Duh, of course we do."

Having all this information at our fingertips is awe-inspiring, yet completely useless if we can't sort through it properly. That's why companies like Google and datamining companies make so much money.

As society and people evolve to adapt to the new technology, we build our "defenses" against bad information. We have so much to go through that unless we are able to filter out bad information that quickly, we'll never get anywhere. Not to mention the fact that in this day and age of spyware/adware, plagiarism, virii and big brother everybody needs to learn what information to avoid.

A perfect example being...

[Steamhead]

How a friend linked me over MSN to a new flash animation on JibJab, myself having seen one before without incident didn't mind, however as soon as I loaded up their site they used flash to get around my pop up blocker and pop up an ad for Western Union.

From now on I will neither go to Jib Jab or even think of using Western Union.

I do not *need* to see their content no matter how good it apparently is.

Gee, you'd think the article wasn't any good...

[Hosiah]

from the response it's getting. No kidding, people make snap judgements about *everything* in about 50 milliseconds. That's about how long it takes for you to decide if a member of the preferred sex is attractive to you, whether an offered kind of food looks appealing, whether or not a suspect is guilty when you hear their arrest break on the news, whether or not you like the TV channel you just flipped to...nothing special about web pages.

Probably a way to take better advice from this is to design your pages so they load *FAST* without too many animations, images, and effects. For instance, the dreaded Flash animation page which presents you with a blank box and a progress meter in the middle ticking up from 1%...which makes me say:

"Hey, I just discovered your site: Tell me WHAT'S loading! Put the name of your site on the page. Direct me to a header page that asks me if I want to see your Flash animation. Put something to read on the page while your dingus loads. Put menus and widgets there, or a graphic, or anything to hold my interest while it loads."

Sites that violate all of the above lose me in *less* than 50 milliseconds.

looks don't always matter

[John Frink]

I usually let my 28.8kbps connection decide if I like the site, and I am a very impatient fellow.

It takes less than 50 milliseconds to judge...

[KNicolson]

...this page

I think this is one of the very rare times that Mr Goatse is on-topic.

Web Site Peeves

[queenb**ch]

50 milliseconds huh?

Here's my list of things that almost guarantee that I'll leave your site behind, never to look back.

1 - Music - Your taste in music is not mine. Your music sucks!
2 - Pages that don't load - It's usually the page that looks like it has exactly what you were searching for too!
3 - Pages that don't contain the information "as advertised" - you know the ones...you click on a link and it goes to some search page that tries to reset your home page.
4 - Pages that are more banner ad than web page - Get over it. No one wants to see that much advertising.
5 - Anything that blinks - Thank god the W3C deprecated the blink tag
6 - Anything that demands I install a plug-in for "the user experience" - espeically those stupid cursors
7 - Anything that spawns pop ads
8 - Anything that doesn't present easy to read and use navigation (www.thetrueagency.com/true.html is a prime example of this)
9 - Anything that doesn't have a sufficient amount of contrast between the text and the background.
10 - Anything that uses more than 5 different fonts on the same page - Its a web site, not a comic book.
11 - Sites that redirect to another redirect - We get the idea that you move - a lot.
12 - Anything that uses more than 6 colors on the same page - It looks like a circus barfed on your page.

2 cents,

Queen B

Re:Navigations and ads

[Anonymous Coward]

Incidentally, 50ms can't be right - very few web sites take less than that to load.

Yes, and if you read the article, it's clear that the study does not show what it claims to:

Even though the images flashed up for just 50 milliseconds, roughly the duration of a single frame of standard television footage, their verdicts tallied well with judgements made after a longer period of scrutiny.

But there is a major flaw. When the image is gone, the participants don't automatically stop making judgements about it.

50 ms (a.k.a. three refreshes at 60 Hz) is long enough for a person to see something and remember basically what it looks like. In fact, your mind will continue to perceive the image well after the display has gone away. This phenomenon is part of what used to be called 'persistence of vision'.

So when the experimenters ask the subject a few seconds later what their impression was, and the subject takes a second or two to indicate a preference, this is not necessarily a 50 ms snap judgement. There are whole seconds during which the image was probably being thought about.

Now, it may be possible that a snap judgement really can be made in 50 ms. But this study does nothing to prove that.

Re:That's Crap

[Crayon Kid]

Now let's talk about how we recognize ad banners in 50ms and shut them out of our vision.