In a Blink of an Eye: The Users Evaluate Pages in a Split Second

One 20th of a second - this is the time required for an Internet user to evaluate a site. 50 milliseconds - and a man has created the first impression of the page and its quality. The user has already decided whether to stay on the page or not.

Doctor Gitte Lindgaard and his two colleagues from Carleton University’s lab in Ottawa tell the British magazine Behaviour & Information Technology.

“We thought that in less than 500 milliseconds it is impossible to examine a page, but it turmed out that it requires 10 times as little as 500 milliseconds, - says Lindgaard. – It means that if the first impression is not favorable a user will leave your page before they even learn what you want to offer to them.”

Before coming to such a bold conclusion the psychologists had conducted a series of tests with volunteers. It goes without saying that they were shown the pages selected by the difference in its visual attack.

After the demonstration the volunteers were asked to evaluate the pages in the respect of the visual attraction. The first evaluations had been fixed the users got the opportunity to look through the pages more thoroughly.

It turned out that the first and the posterior evaluations coincide. “To all appearances, the creators of the pages have about one 20th of a second in their possession to make a good impression,” - say the scientists.

“We all know that the first impression often tends to be the decisive one, - writes the Nature magazine, - but the research shows that the brain is able to make up a flash-judgment almost as fast as the eye get the information.”

Nature duns of the fact that the long-lasting effect of the first impression is known as the “halo-effect” or “aureole effect”. In the case with the sites it means that a creator can entice the users by the attractive design – in order to make the impression favorable.

Probably the users will then let some of the drawbacks and errors slip and will be able to reach the content of the page and evaluate the page on the whole quite high.

“It means that we make judgements very fast relying on our emotional reaction and our more thoughtful judgements still reflect the first impression”, - comments an Australian psychology professor Bill von Hippel from the University of New South Wales. He says that such an ability can theoretically help us react faster in case of emergency.

The phenomenon is penetrating out society according to professor Landgaard: even doctors start following their first impression while diagnosing. “It seems mad, but the tendency towards fast judgements is even more widely spread than we might think,” – says the psychiatrist.

But how to make a user stay on your page for longer that 51-52 milliseconds?

The key to success is different according to different specialists. Some suggest limiting the amount of graphics and content on the page, others suggest placing the navigation where it is expected to be.

The major rules have been formulated by Marc Caudron from the British media-agency Pod1. He considers that the users are interested in getting the info in the fastest and simplest way available.

But the owners of the site have to take into consideration that the pages should load as fast as possible. Otherwise, a user might even not wait for the first 50-millisecond impression.

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