Slashdot Mirror
Web Users Judge Sites in the Blink of an Eye
dogbolter writes "Nature.com is reporting on a study by Canadian researcher Gitte Lindgaard of Carleton University that visitors to a webpage can make up their minds about the quality of the page within just 50 milliseconds." From the article: "We all know that first impressions count, but this study shows that the brain can make flash judgments almost as fast as the eye can take in the information. The discovery came as a surprise to some experts. "My colleagues believed it would be impossible to really see anything in less than 500 milliseconds," says Gitte Lindgaard of Carleton University in Ottawa, who has published the research in the journal Behaviour and Information Technology. Instead they found that impressions were made in the first 50 milliseconds of viewing."
I knew within 50 nanoseconds that this was a dupe.
i judge slashdot lazy.
n/t
you had me at #!
literally yesterdays news http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/01/1 6/0558244
I'm sure I saw this yesterday on Slashdot!
I can find a dupe in less time than it takes for IE to become infested with crappola from the intarweb! Can you?
But after 50 milliseconds I decided I didn't like the page.
Slashdot editors appear to only spend 50 nanoseconds checking an article before posting.
unzip; strip; touch; finger; mount; fsck; more; yes; unmount; sleep
...book judged by cover.
Dark Energy May Be Changing
My other account has a 3-digit UID.
The second time round?
Czech language for absolute beginners
eeeh he
At least it wasn't posted by **(You know who).
ScuttleMonkey, please take five and get some coffee, and try reading the front page every once in a while.
May the Maths Be with you!
And hey, It would have only taken 50 milliseconds to look at yesterdays news :).
Slashdot Users Detect Dupes in the Blink of an Eye
Do the slashdot editors ever actually do something radical like....oh, I dunno
READ SLASHDOT?!
*shakes head*
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Fresh coffee and fresh dupes ... what more do you want to start the day?
I modded yesterday's article, so now I have a chance to say something about this. I think that if the user can't make up his mind whether he likes the site or not in such a short period of time, then the site is obviously broken.
If I can't tell what a site is about by looking at the way it presents itself, then its design is flawed and I simply don't want to be visiting it anyway.
I wonder how this ability to rapidly judge things correlates to everyday life. The 50 millisecond snap decision we make when accessing a website is frequently correct. Websites with poor layout, bad colors, busy graphics, etc. all point to bad websites and typically bad content.
If we can accurately judge a website in 50 milliseconds, can we also do so with people? Is there something to the snap decision that the group of black youths 20 meters ahead of me are probably trouble? How much should we suppress our natural instinct when it has been shown to be correct for webpages?
When I see articles here appear 3 days after they appear on a free paper newspaper on the local train, thats the
day when I think, man!! slash has lost it.... in 1997 it was all fantastic, not its utter lame. iexbeta.com is better, arstechnia is better.
Fix the damn boring green defaults.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
It happens when they change somthing in the Matrix, so beware, agents are coming!
-- javaDragon is an instance of JavaDragon.
to ask the editors to use the search feature provided on Slashdot to search the past stories using the keywords from the submission? Using the following would have found the dupe:
web users blink eye
-- You see, there would be these conclusions that you could jump to
Third time's the charm, ready for tomorrow's "Web users judge sites in the blink of an eye"?
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
Grab your +5 comments here for some instant karma. Well, the editors dupe the articles, we might as well dupe the comments...
It's official. Most of you are morons.
I'm just reading the paper myself. More interestingly than judgements being made on gut reaction, it discusses the characteristics of attractive websites. It appears that complexity (as long as it isn't confusing) has no effect on how attractive websites are rated.
Interestingly, the experiments participants agreed strongly with each other, but there was less agreement between them as a group, and a separate group of "experts".
Perhaps the moral of the story is: don't bother with usability analysis - get an artists to design a "cool" site.
However, the design of this study (relying on 500ms views - yes, that's five hundred milliseconds - read the paper if you don't believe me) may not be the best way to rate sites. There is a high correlation between the "short" ratings (500 & 50ms duration) and longer term ratings, but I'm still skeptical.
And yes, this paper is a dupe
bang goes my karma... again...
I may be asking for it here but I always wondered this. I've been reading /. for years but only recently started posting and my question is, why do some people get so angry about dupes? They can be a bit annoying, yes but I've read some really horrible and insulting remaks to the editors in the past because of dupes. I mean people seem furious. It's like the editors kicked their children and stole the ice-cream while delivering the household bills.
Have I missed something that makes this crime so heinous.
/.ers pick dupes in the blink of an eye.
..I have already judged this article twice!
It is proven!
Slasdot editors spend 50 miliseconds before approving stories. No wonder so many dupes...
So people can find them amid the flood of dupe reports.
I dont know how they tested this (probably with screenshots) but a page never loads within 50ms. In real life the way (speed, layout correct, banners slowing down, etc) a page loads is also imporant.
The 50ms cant be right how do they even measure such a response you do not click within 50ms.
Basicly I do not trust this research.
200GB/2TB $7.95 Coupon: SAVE90DOLLAR
this news should have been posted yesterday, then we would have the original and the dupe on the same site! Wouldn't that be fun?
It amazes me how dupes appear on Slashdot like this. I mean how can this happen? Please don't make me start reading all my tech/nerd news from digg.com instead.
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.
nice work with the dupe, duper
You know this idea that people make judgements in the first 50ms before you can really gain a conscious impression of it (though probably something flashes in your subconcious) remind me of one of the entries in the "Dangerous Ideas" article in Edge (slashdot had it as a story a short while ago) in which Nobel Prize winning biochemist Eric R. Kandel argues that much of what we call "free will" is processed unconsciously without awareness:
http://www.edge.org/q2006/q06_5.html
ERIC R. KANDEL
Biochemist and University Professor, Columbia University; Recipient, The Nobel Prize, 2000; Author, Cellular Basis of Behavior
Free will is exercised unconsciously, without awareness
It is clear that consciousness is central to understanding human mental processes, and therefore is the holy grail of modern neuroscience. What is less clear is that much of our mental processes are unconscious and that these unconscious processes are as important as conscious mental processes for understanding the mind. Indeed most cognitive processes never reach consciousness.
As Sigmund Freud emphasized at the beginning of the 20th century most of our perceptual and cognitive processes are unconscious, except those that are in the immediate focus of our attention. Based on these insights Freud emphasized that unconscious mental processes guide much of human behavior.
Freud's idea was a natural extension of the notion of unconscious inference proposed in the 1860s by Hermann Helmholtz, the German physicist turned neural scientist. Helmholtz was the first to measure the conduction of electrical signals in nerves. He had expected it to be as the speed of light, fast as the conduction of electricity in copper cables, and found to his surprise that it was much slower, only about 90m sec. He then examined the reaction time, the time it takes a subject to respond to a consciously a perceived stimulus, and found that it was much, much slower than even the combined conduction times required for sensory and motor activities.
This caused Helmholz to argue that a great deal of brain processing occurred unconsciously prior to conscious perception of an object. Helmholtz went on to argue that much of what goes on in the brain is not represented in consciousness and that the perception of objects depends upon "unconscious inferences" made by the brain, based on thinking and reasoning without awareness. This view was not accepted by many brain scientists who believed that consciousness is necessary for making inferences. However, in the 1970s a number of experiments began to accumulate in favor of the idea that most cognitive processes that occur in the brain never enter consciousness.
Perhaps the most influential of these experiments were those carried out by Benjamin Libet in 1986. Libet used as his starting point a discovery made by the German neurologist Hans Kornhuber. Kornhuber asked volunteers to move their right index finger. He then measured this voluntary movement with a strain gauge while at the same time recording the electrical activity of the brain by means of an electrode on the skull. After hundreds of trials, Kornhuber found that, invariably, each movement was preceded by a little blip in the electrical record from the brain, a spark of free will! He called this potential in the brain the "readiness potential" and found that it occurred one second before the voluntary movement.
Libet followed up on Kornhuber's finding with an experiment in which he asked volunteers to lift a finger whenever they felt the urge to do so. He placed an electrode on a volunteer's skull and confirmed a readiness potential about one second before the person lifted his or her finger. He then compared the time it took for the person to will the movement with the time of the readiness potential.
Amazingly, Libet found that the readiness potential appeared not after, but 200 milliseconds before a person felt the urge to move his or her finger! Thus by merely
All they need is a similiar entry feature, such that when they make or approve a post, a list of similiar entries is shown. We can call that the dupe detector when something is posted, and similiar posts if it gets used on a post's page.
Now excuse me while I take a dupe.
Never double post.
Never double post.
God created man in his own image, but somehow he evolved into a hairless monkey.
What really irks me is the fact that the dupe refers to an article that is almost pointless in that it merely attaches a "scientific number" to a process most of us already know/follow - quick judgement. So what?
Will we have articles saying how motorists can spot an accident within 75 milliseconds? Or that long-time hunters can spot an alarmed bird a full 60 milliseconds before the rest of us? Or that being scalded by hot coffee takes 25 milliseconds to register in the brain?
The original post was based on a lame article. This one is a dupe of a post that was based on a lame article which appeared 3 full days ago across almost all Internet sites and publications. Thats what makes this so damn irritating!
hey , it is true! It took me only 50ms to detect this newspost as a dupe. Cool!
This article is obviously rubbish
... oh yeah..
Web Users Judge Sites in an Instant Blink!
Posted by Zonk on Monday January 16, @12:57AM
from the judging-quick-by-its-learners dept.
Ant writes "This Nature.com news article reports on a study by Canadian researcher Gitte Lindgaard of Carleton University 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. From the article: "We all know that first impressions count, but this study shows that the brain can make flash judgments almost as fast as the eye can take in the information." 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...'" who has published the research in the journal Behaviour and Information Technology. Instead they found that impressions were made in the first 50 milliseconds of viewing."
whatever... this was supposed to be funny
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
Whenever I see Comic Sans it's pretty much worthless on academic information. Problem is, many unis still think it's cool to use it for application forms such as family accomodation. It's hard to take such things serious.
The question is how does a program recognise a dupe? My first guess would be to verify the links in the story intro against a list of already posted ones. I would not go for read links as not that many people read the articles first.
Any other ideas?
So that would be why none of my websites seem to do very well. Sigh.
I used to have a better sig but it broke.
Before i say anything, i'm not a fanboy etc, and i've been reading slahdot for quite a while. I recently started reading digg, and this article is just another example of the difference between the two and the problem with slashdot. Whoever the editors here are, they clearly don't have enought time to cover everything they are trying to. Peter http://peteremcc.wordpress.com
Because we want Slashdot to be better.
That simple, really, and we can't understand why the powers that be wouldn't jump at this opportunity of making it better.
this comment is provided "as is" and without any express or implied legibility or congruity [...]
Okay, why can't I find one fucking comment at +3, +2, or +1 that's actually on topic? *sheesh* I'm starting to not even read the comments here...
Anyway, I'd like to call bullshit on this article. Granted, this is only anecdotal, but when visiting the local Science Museum I couldn't even *react* within 70ms. I play MUD's a lot, I can *tell* the difference between 50ms and 100ms, but to make an intelligent judgment about what I'm seeing?
Forget it.
Yeah, gut 'instinct' will affect you - this is news how?
Websites judge YOU!
...in the blink of an eye!
"Women are just like ninjas; They lie even when it is more convenient to tell the truth." ~ Unknown
... how you are meant to judge a site with your eyes closed?
"Women are just like ninjas; They lie even when it is more convenient to tell the truth." ~ Unknown
That's an interesting question. All of us habitually read Slashdot while we're avoiding our own work. But if Slashdot is your work, what do you read between tasks? All these dupes are evidence that they don't actually read this site, so where do they go?
Is that longer than it takes for the site to be duped on slashdot?
bkd
Unfortunately it takes well over 50 miliseconds for stumbleupon to work. I have to actually see crappy sites for a full 250 milliseconds after giving them the thumb down!
This was a advertizement for stumbleupon - or against. I'm not sure...
Microsoft is pure dog-ma. FreeBSD is pure cat-ma.
Seriously, guys... after 4 or 5 people say it's a dupe, there is no reason to keep repeating it. I love /. more because of the comments than because of the posts themselves. But when the reading community post like 50 comments that only say "good lord, that's a dupe!", the main purpose of the comment system is not being fulfilled.
So say we all
The irony of just about every post complaining of a duplicate news article is just funny.
And every 2nd post complaining that the editors have not bothered to read what has been posted before is even funnier.
Is this a sign of intelligence? Or is it a sign of the instant-gratification age?
You must read what is on the page to judge how good or bad it is, in my opinion.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Great idea doing all those re-runs. People get more karma and modpoints, which is good. I can't WAIT for the Ghost in the Shell SAC article re-run because I sorta missed it :-S
Sanity:
When it feels like you're having deja vu and you're questioning yourself if you've seen the story before: have you gone crazy? I swear I've seen that one before! Where is it? *Older Stories* Ugh, where is that story? I know you're here somewhere! How long ago would that have been posted? Maybe it was the first story the last time I checked . . . etc.
"Perl.com has a new article entitled What is Perl 6?. It analyzes the changes to the language in light of the good and bad points of Perl 5 and provides new information about the current state of the project: Perl 6 exists, you can write code in it today, and it's more consistent and easier to use than Perl 5."
Nature.com is reporting on a study by Zonk, of Slashdot, that visitors to the popular tech news site can expect to see duplicated stories on the frontpage within just 50 milliseconds. From the article: "We all know that first impressions count, but this study shows that when a story is submitted to digg several days beforehand, the brain of the average Slashdot editor can make false judgements on dupes almost as fast as the eye can take in information. The discovery came as no surprise to most readers."
Christopher Harrison
Why people feel the need to post the same comments from the previous story into this one? Is it just karma whoring or am I missing something?
http://slashdot.org/faq/com-mod.shtml#cm700
Note that being moderated Funny doesn't help your karma. You have to be smart, not just a smart-ass.
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
It took me a while to figure out that dupe meant duplication OR the repeat posting of an article.
I was wondering how the article was duping people & what was so obviously untrue in the article.
I have read Slashdot for a few years, sometimes religiously, but I somehow missed the abr. of dupe.
Makes you wonder if the editors even read this website, doesn't it?
So how could i judge it within the first 50 ms?
..."
Browser: "<html
me: "No. I don't like this page."
Where the K is for Quality!
The dupes aren't going away, deal with it. You're all offtopic, where's my bitchstick... WTF article is actually saying is that people judge on how pretty/attractive it is - not on the actual content. This is why new releases of shitty software are usually wrapped in the equivalent of a sexy paint-job, and why Baywatch was so popular.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
For those who are actually looking for *content* as opposed to shiny things, well... thats different.
smash.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Why the hell should I give a damn finding and posting interesting stories to ./ that are regularly rejected when a dupe is so easily accepted!
Sigh!
Yeah moderators, you can rate this as "flame".
"linux" is a very common word and was not included in your search.
Similarly, I saw the story, blinked my eyes and this dupe was posted.
When I first saw /. I thought 'yuck' but, I'm still here..
This must be the first discussion where none of the posts are on topic (at least the topic the editors are trying to dupe us into discussing).
This post ensures we don't break our new record.
Rubies and Pearls are not what you think.
dupe
dope
pope
pore
porn
http://maddox.xmission.com/
~150million hits?
Proof by counter-example?
This one was a little too recent, though. Can't there be a mechanism in place to auto-deny all identical submissions when one is accepted?
Yes, *that* Bob Vila.
This doesn't strike me as any surprise. A major part of a website's quality, in my opinion, is the layout. If it's 80% images (which will not be loaded, but which give a distinctive patten as the page starts loading), it'll often be a poorly laid out site, often stuffed with ads. If the text puts up and fills the screen, then it's a text only or mostly text site, and unless the text is an awful font or color scheme, I'll like it.
All this is simple enough to be a reflex, and I do hit Alt+Left very, very fast sometimes, a little too fast to consciously think it through. Not 50 milliseconds, but around 300 milliseconds, but once you include the time for signals to be sent and interpreted by my fingers, it seems to make sense.
"I have read Slashdot for a few years, sometimes religiously, but I somehow missed the abr. of dupe."
;) j/k
You Sir must be editor material, expect to be contacted shortly
this comment is provided "as is" and without any express or implied legibility or congruity [...]
to take the site down. Hence the dupe.
I wonder if that 50ms flash judgment is at all affected by the length of time it takes to initially load the page for viewing. What good is a 50ms impression if you end up sitting there waiting for 10-20 seconds as each element progressively loads? By the time the page is done, very often any positive initial impression will definitely have changed.
Your post complaining about dupes of posts complaining about dupes is itself a dupe!
*ducks*
I don't think SilverwoodUG's comment warranted a troll moderation. He is certainly ON topic (the topic of website judgement) while 95% of the other replies here should all be OFF-topic, as the subject of the article is not slashdot dupes...
If I had but some mod points left to use..
Install COX in your backend today!
Therefore the solution is to only allow your page to be seend for 47 millliseconds. (3 seconds less because some people's eyesight is better than others)
BTW If you flash your page like the retarded ads do, then you'll still be giving people more than 50 milliseconds to judge your website and they'll most likely hate your website because if strobes at a horrible frequency.
I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.
(Posting AC because I don't like making enemies this quickly)
/. for the comments. When I post comments (which are rare), I get more satisfaction from the moderation system than the quality of responses. The reverse is preferred, but that's what I've noticed.
Think of it this way:
Student A studies and gathers knowledge in order to participate in class while Student B does no such preparations.
While thoroughly discussing the lesson, Student A accidentally repeats one sentence. Seeing an opportunity to participate at all, Student B jumps up and yells, "Dupe!".
Thus, Student B feels satisfied with participating in the discussion. To frustrate things further, Student B compares that single antic to their classmate's lengthy preparations as being equally productive.
I too read
People tend to be lazy, so well prepared comments are pretty tough to find. The moderation system isn't populated by many lazy a-holes, so if you think of that system as a form of commenting (technically a vehicle for promoting comments), the situation isn't so bad. SNR gets significantly improved at a +3 threshold.
Even in a seemingly dead thread, the moderators do their job well. Of course you could always refer to the duped thread for original comments (lots of karma whores here)...
It's a rerun. Common, when NBC, CBS, etc can have reruns, why can't Slashdot? I we don't have these reruns, then we would have to buy Wivos (Web Tivo). Hail the reruns!
-ItsME
I'd like to get my hand on their web browser that loads pages in less than 50 milliseconds!
Currently hooked on AMP
If you want to see the relevant comments, surely you can just head back to the previous time it was on /.?
See that's the thing.. you shouldn't be trying to make comments that win you points. You should make comments when you have something to say. Whether it be because you actually know something useful, have something you think people will enjoy reading, or are just really passionate about the subject.
Which is why I don't filter out flamebait.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Problem: Web users read and ignore stories in the blink of an eye.
Solution: Slashdot editors post a story a number of times to make sure it gets the attention it deserves.
The Nature article suggests some golden rules of creating a good-looking website:
1) Strictly limited graphics limited to a single eye-catching image.
"It's not about getting as much stuff on the page as possible," he says.
2) A "puritan" approach to web pages which get information across in the quickest, simplest way possible.
3)Make sure that your web pages load quickly.
It gives them a leg up on what they will put on the front page the next day.
Blink by Malcolm Gladwell is all about flash judgements people make in the blink of an eye. Great read. Very relevant
The previous story was about users judging sites instantly. Now they judge them in the blink of an eye, which, although very fast, is not instant.
If you can read this sig, you're too close.
It seems the humour is too dry for the audience.
It refers to a story that was duplicated five times (making a total of six entries) on slashdot.
But anyway, never mind that shit, the Baltimore Sun is reporting that a Canadian company, Delcan NET, will begin testing a technology that determines the flow of automobile traffic by monitoring cell phone traffic. The company promises a revolutionary way to determine backups, but privacy advocates fear the implications of a third party tracking users by their cell phones.
That must be the amount of time for popups to open up.
Looks like websites and women have something in common. It only takes 50ms for men to decide if they're hot or not.
So what are the key ingredients of a good-looking website? Caudron suggests that the amount of graphics on the page should be strictly limited, perhaps to a single eye-catching image. "It's not about getting as much stuff on the page as possible," he says.
;-)
Guessing is always fun, but could get too personal. I agree, and disagree about this guess. I've developed a layout for a magazine from scratch, and made some theories about what's attractive layout. One regulates the number of objects and goes as follows:
1. Nothing beats an incredible picture. So if you have one, make it big and reduce the number of other objects. ("minimalistic"). The expression "a picture tells more than 1000 words" nicely describe this situation.
However, how often do you have a really eyecatching picture? Not very often. So with an minimalistic approach, you've just have a big not-so-interesting picture at the top of your website. Surely, that can't be the best solution. So:
2. If your pictures are medicore, add many objects, that also are interesting. It could be text, other images, arrows, symbols etc. This will not lead to an messy layout, since you've nicly organised the objects in some way. This approach I like to compare to having many "fishhooks in the sea". If just one or two of the objects you've added are interesting to the reader, then that person may starting the text or look at the rest of the objects.
The lasting effect of first impressions is known to psychologists as the 'halo effect': if you can snare people with an attractive design, they are more likely to overlook other minor faults with the site, and may rate its actual content (such as this article, for example) more favourably.
Strangely the halo-effect also applies in human-to-human interaction. Pretty people are thought to have better qualites (smarter, more gifted, funnier, etc.) than the ugly ones. Why? No idea. Maybe deep down in the humans brain we know that the probability for pretty people actually being more intelligent is higher than 50%. So the halo-effect is really nothing more than a primal mate-selection-effect.
101 front pages and still counting
I realized that this article was bullshit...and then I noticed that it was from an article in Nature. No wonder.
Nature is the sort of science journal that will accept anything the journals won't stoop so low as to accept. Nature articles are, in a word, crap.
I just had the idea that every story should be automatically duped after 24 hours. So all the stupid "first post" crap would (hopefully) not be there, and we might get some serious discussions.
Uninteresting - at least at first glance. Hell's Cameron Diaz and why should I care what he/she/it tripped over ?
How many beans make five, anyhow ?