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.

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.