Martin just emailed me a link to an article that is sure to depress some bloggers. It talks about how internet users only take one twentieth of a second to decide whether they like the look of a website.
‘Dr Gitte Lindgaard and colleagues from Carleton University in Ottawa flashed up websites for 50 milliseconds and asked participants to rate them for visual appeal.
When they repeated the exercise after a longer viewing period, the participants’ ratings were consistent.
“Visual appeal can be assessed within 50 milliseconds, suggesting that web designers have about 50 milliseconds to make a good impression,” the Canadians report in the journal Behaviour & Information Technology.’
How do they decide what they like and don’t like? Well the article doesn’t go into great detail except to say:
‘She says the appeal of a website is usually tied to colour, movement and interactivity, with the way the information is structured coming second.’
I’ve written about the quickness the average blog visitors stays on blogs before but one twentieth of a second is pretty full on! All the more reason to work on blog design and think about what message your blog is communicating in the first few seconds of a visit.
