If I could copyright this phrase, I would. It’s a personal quote I’ve been using for years as I’ve watched the Internet consume our attention in the 21st century.
I’ve always known that web visitors judge a book by its cover and they usually do so in a ‘blink’ of an eye. That’s the way CNN reported it today.
According to article, research conducted by Canadian researchers (eh?), visitors will take just a brief 1/20th of second -less than half the time it takes to blink – to make aesthetic judgments that influence the total overall visit.
As some bloggers quoted before the national article, the research doesn’t give much insight as to what worked or not, but the fundamental response should be an important consideration for designers.
There are some other comments published in an article from Nature.com that highlights some other issues about this topic and refers to the ‘halo effect’ and ‘cognitive bias’ that is worth pondering in the studio too.
The ‘halo effect’ is described as “if you can snare people with an attractive design, they are more likely to overlook other minor faults with the site, and may rate its actual content (such as this article, for example) more favorably.”
‘Cognitive bias’ refers to the perception that people like to be right. According to the article; ‘People enjoy being right, so continuing to use a website that gave a good first impression helps to ‘prove’ to themselves that they made a good initial decision. The phenomenon pervades our society; even doctors have been shown to follow their initial hunches relying heavily on a patient’s most immediately obvious symptom when making a diagnosis. “It’s awfully scary stuff, but the tendency to jump to conclusions is far more widespread than we realize.”
The designer quoted in Nature suggests that today users want to see a ‘Puritan’ approach to website design. Information delivered in the quickest, simplest way possible.