Users love simple and familiar designs – Why websites need to make a great first impression by Javier Bargas-Avila, Senior User Experience Researcher at YouTube UX Research
I knew it didn’t take long to love/hate a website but…:
I’m sure you’ve experienced this at some point: You click on a link to a website, and after a quick glance you already know you’re not interested, so you click ‘back’ and head elsewhere. How did you make that snap judgment? Did you really read and process enough information to know that this website wasn’t what you were looking for? Or was it something more immediate?
We form first impressions of the people and things we encounter in our daily lives in an extraordinarily short timeframe. We know the first impression a website’s design creates is crucial in capturing users’ interest. In less than 50 milliseconds, users build an initial “gut feeling” that helps them decide whether they’ll stay or leave. This first impression depends on many factors: structure, colors, spacing, symmetry, amount of text, fonts, and more.
As a comparison, the post cites the blink of an eye taking from 100 to 400 milliseconds.
Raises the bar on the 30 second “elevator speech” doesn’t it?
Pass this on to web page, topic map (and other) semantic technology and software interface designers in general.
How would you test a webpage given this time constraint? (Serious question.)
[…] little bit longer than Love or Hate in 50 Milliseconds but it still raises the bar over the thirty (30) second elevator […]
Pingback by The First Three Seconds: How Users Are Lost « Another Word For It — September 21, 2012 @ 2:02 pm