In 2006 a
group of Canadian researchers (Lindgaard, Fernandes, Dudek, and Brown)
published an article in the Business & Information Technology Journal
called Attention web designers: You
have 50 milliseconds to make a good first impression*. In this
study the researchers tested whether a very short exposure (50 milliseconds or
1/20 of a second ) is enough to create a quality perception about a web site
that is consistent with the quality perception about the site if people examine
the same web site for a longer time. They found indeed that 50 milliseconds are
enough for internet users to form a positive or negative impression about a web
site.
I thought
this is a good example to use in order make clear to my students of the Master
Advanced Topics in Digital Marketing today how important is the web site design
for the quality perception of people about web sites and how short time is
needed in order to form an opinion about a site’s aesthetic quality.
I started my
lecture today with a short experiment where all present students took part: I
presented them 2 web sites (that in my view could be examples of good and bad
design) on the screen. They were exposed to a screenshot of each web site
twice, the first time for 200 milliseconds (it was not possible to make a 50
milliseconds exposure in this setting) and the second time for 10 seconds which
is close to the average time that Internet users look to new sites when
browsing the web searching for something online before deciding to stay in the
site or move on.
Forty-seven
students took part in the experiment and although it is not a really scientific
one the results confirm the findings of the Lindgaard et.al. study from 10
years ago: The consistency of quality perception between the very short and the
long exposure is impressive. In the case of the “nice” web site 78% of the
participants said that they liked in after the short exposure (200
milliseconds) versus 93% who liked the site after a more thorough examination
during the 10 second exposure. In the case of the “not nice” web site the
results were even more impressive: 100% did not like the site in the short
exposure and 98% also did not like it after the second long exposure.
Can this
mean that bad designed web sites have a stronger negative effect on us than the
good designed web sites if we are exposed to them online? This is possible but
what is sure is that the statement of the Canadian colleagues in their article
10 years ago is still valid.
There can be maybe more conclusions from our not
scientific test but maybe it will be a good idea to replicate the Canadian
study to get a good impression of the effect of web design on quality
perceptions today when Internet users are much more experienced and
sophisticated than 10 years ago.
In the
picture you can see the results of the test, Web site A is the "nice"
and Web site B is the "not nice" one.
*Lindgaard, G., G. Fernandes, C. Dudek, and J.
Brown. 2006. Attention web designers: You have 50 milliseconds to make a good
first impression. Business & Information Technology 25 (2): 115–126.
