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The [researchers]... showed volunteers glimpses of websites, lasting for only 50 milliseconds.The researchers found that the speedily formed conclusions closely tallied with opinions of the websites that had been made after much longer periods of examination.
The study, published in the journal Behaviour and Information Technology, also suggests that first impressions have a lasting impact.
[news.bbc.co.uk...]
Syzygy
Seems you need to polish the stuff that loads first.
also suggests that first impressions have a lasting impact
"You have 3 seconds to make a sale".
Looks like you might only get a fraction of that...
Syzygy
50 millisecs? Mine takes 25 seconds to load!
That is a very good point. Perhaps we shouldn't show _anything_ until the whole page is downloaded?
I really hope someone didn't pay too much for this study
I agree. What difference does it make whether it takes 1/20th second, or 1/2 sec (which they expected]? Do people click to leave in 51 milliseconds?
We all know first impressions are important and design sites accordingly. But if impressions are formed EVERY 50 milliseconds, then we have plenty of time for additional impressions.
It would be much more instructive to learn what elements in a web page made positive impressions so quickly. Color? Layout? It certainly couldn't be anything in page text. Reading ONE word takes longer.
I'm not sure the 50ms number can possibly apply to a real site since DNS lookup and a single HTTP/TCP startup handshake will *usually* take way longer than that, but there is an oft-quoted figure of 100ms where anything that happens quicker than that is perceived as "fast" in HCI (human-computer interaction), eg in GUIs and Web pages.
However, I have tweaked my site to make sure that the first page that a new visitor sees on my main site is seen as quickly as possible at the cost of some peripheral features, eg I may not load a background image or show so many ads or show as many thumbnails as usual on that first page. I shall see if I can tell any change in user behaviour, eg more stickyness.
A pleasant side-effect is that "bungee users" that look at one page and leave cost me much less than before, and I just loaded my system with 100x more users than usual for a while (I blew $100 on AdBrite to do it!) and it coped well!
PPC meets HCI meets anti-DDoS! B^>
Rgds
Damon
The Canadian team showed volunteers glimpses of websites, lasting for only 50 milliseconds
I am assuming that they collected a series of images from web pages and displayed them in some sort of slide show and asked for an instant impression based on that glimpse.
So its safe to assume that the only things they could determine from a glimpse is color, layout, visual impact.
Maybe I should have kept my old websites with all the bright colors, 3d graphics, flashing text, marquees and multi-colored buttons!
One interesting tidbit (not from this research) is that humans actually make decisions much quicker than they are aware of doing so, eg may start to move muscles to zap an alien in a game before they claim to be aware that the alien is even there.
I'm not sure how fast various bits of the visual cortex are, but the "too many gaudy ads" alarm could go off fairly fast I'm prepared to bet.
So I try to keep ads relatively tasteful and low-key on my sites: one reason why AdSense works IMHO.
Rgds
Damon
