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According to an article in “news @ nature.com” by Michael Hopkin a new study shows that first impressions not only lasts but also counts more then we first imagined. The article is based on a Canadian study led by Gitte Lindgaard of Carleton University in Ottawa:

Lindgaard and her team presented volunteers with the briefest glimpses of web pages previously rated as being either easy on the eye or particularly jarring, and asked them to rate the websites on a sliding scale of visual appeal. Even though the images flashed up for just 50 milliseconds, roughly the duration of a single frame of standard television footage, their verdicts tallied well with judgements made after a longer period of scrutiny.

We have in a previous post talked about this sort quick test before, usually referred to as a 5-second-usabilty-test (though this study shortens it even further).

There are several things that spring to mind when I read this article. First it is interesting to see how much the individual user will weigh the first impression. If the first impression is good but the site later turns out to be a bit anti-user-friendly or maybe even error-prone, the user in many cases are willing to overlook these difficulties and errors because of the good first impression:

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.

What makes a good first impression? Of key issues is mentioned that the amount of graphics on the front page should be strictly limited – maybe one single eye-catching image will do just fine. Lately I’ve seen many websites re-structuring their front page to have a simple and clear message with maybe one lifestyle-like image in the top left part of the page. But there is still many bad examples out there. See for example the front pages of the European Unions website, FLSmidth, Grundfos or Lloyds TSB. Then compare them to Dell, General Electric or Writely.

Of cause there can be several good reasons why a website might want to have a lot of information on the front page – but there are no good excuses for just throwing it in there like it was a notice board in the product managers office.

Technorati Tags: usability, Carleton University, Ottawa

This entry was posted by Thomas Watson Steen on Monday, January 16th, 2006 at 13:25 (GMT-1) and is filed under Usability. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.