Web surfers quickly decide a site's worth: study

[Tami]

Web surfers quickly decide a site\'s worth: study

Canadian Press

TORONTO — Graphic designers have long known the importance of good looks for things like ad copy and book covers.

Now, a study backs it up for websites.

Researchers at Ottawa\'s Carleton University found that web surfers decide the worth of a site in a mere 50 milliseconds.

\"People make up their mind very, very quickly about how much they like what they see,\" said Gitte Lindgaard, one of the study\'s authors.

\"It\'s like one frame of a television program. It\'s very, very quick . . . but it\'s enough for me to decide whether it feels good or feels bad.\"

The study was published in the recent edition of the journal Behaviour and Information Technology.

Researchers at the university\'s Human-Oriented Technology Lab started out by exposing volunteers to web pages for 500 milliseconds - half a second. They then asked the viewers to judge each website\'s appeal on scale of zero to 100. They repeated the test on a new set of volunteers, shortening the time frame to 50 milliseconds - 1/20th of a second.

They were surprised to get similar ratings from both groups.

Users made their decision based completely on visual appearance, since they were unable to decipher the site\'s content in such a short time-frame, said Lindgaard, a professor of human-computer interaction in the department of psychology. Their first impression could leave a lasting mark.

\"We know from the judgment and decision-making literature that once we have formed an opinion, that opinion is likely to stick and we\'re going to look selectively for evidence supporting our hypothesis,\" said Lindgaard.

It\'s what academics call \"cognitive bias.\"

\"In other words, if I like what I see I\'ll go looking for any evidence that supports my idea that this is good stuff. I want to prove to myself that I made a good decision.\"

She said businesses might consider pumping more cash into the esthetic appeal of their website.

\"The message to web developers is, at this point in time, you better make sure you don\'t offend people visually,\" she said.

\"That first impression is likely to carry over to subsequent tasks and interaction. If you\'re ugly, I may not stick around at all to see what you offer.\"

It\'s a message Matthew Ross, creative director of Liberty Street Creative, a web and print design firm in Toronto, has long known.

\"We stress to clients that there can\'t be anything on the home page that is unattractive,\" he said.

\"If you\'re a chemicals company, put green grass and trees on the home page and we\'ll get to the fact that you make bio-hazard stuff later.\"

But Ross stressed that holding on to a web surfer requires much more than good looks.

A site\'s loading time, content and ease-of-use all play a major role in whether people stay on a site beyond a few seconds, he said.

The Carleton lab\'s next project is to pinpoint the elements that make a website appealing to users.

\"We\'ve been trying to figure out from these web pages whether there were any commonalities between the ones that were liked . . . We really haven\'t found an awful lot,\" said Lindgaard.

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