Paper: Attention Web Designers: You have 50 milliseconds to make a good first impression!

Attention Web Designers: You have 50 milliseconds to make a good first impression!

Behaviour & Information Technology, Vol. 25, No. 2, March-April 2006, 115 – 126
GITTE LINDGAARD, GARY FERNANDES, CATHY DUDEK and J. BROWN
Human-Oriented Technology Lab, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada

3 studies to determine how fast people form an opinion about web page visual appeal and the reliability of those judgments.

Study 1: Participants rated the visual appeal of web pages presented in two phases for 500ms each. Purpose: "to determine the reliability of visual appeal ratings and select a subset of the pages to use in the second study."

Study 2: Same as first, but added a 3rd phase where participants viewed each page for as long as they liked while rating each web page on 7 visual design dimensions (bolded items had high correlation to visual appeal: simple-complex, interesting-boring, clear-confusing, well designed-poorly designed,good use of color-bad use of color, good layout-bad layout, imaginative-unimaginative). Purpose: To determine the reliability of visual appeal ratings of the subset of pages and to begin to explore visual characteristics that may be related to visual appeal."

Study 3: Same as first, but some saw the pages for only 50ms while other saw them for 500ms. Purpose: determine whether the first impression may be formed in an even shorter amount of time than 500ms.

Visual appeal ratings were highly correlated from on phase to the next as were the correlations between the 50ms and 500ms conditions and the 7 factor ratings.

"Halo Effect" or "Confirmation Bias": When users ignore evidence contradictory to their initial impression and pay attention only to evidence that confirms the impression.

Visual appeal factors may be detected first and these could influence how users judge subsequent experience and enjoyment of the site. (Jennings 2000, Tractinsky et al. 2000) (Lindgaard and Dudek 2002).

Even if a website is highly usable and useful and presented logically, if the first impression is not a good one, the user may not be willing to see the site positively. Therefor, it's crucial to make the first impression a good one regardless of usability or content.

TODO: Test eCAFE to see if increasing our "visual appeal" has an effect on our completion rates. Could try a different design for each campus and compare against historical numbers.

1/20/11 (12 pgs, 70m = 5.8 mpp) minutes per page