Day Five: But I’m not having much luck. The wonderfully gifted Will Rogers famously said, “You’ll never get a second chance to make a good first impression.” Corny? Yes. Overused? Yes. True? Mostly. I was slogging my way through a Harvard research study titled Predicting Users’ First Impressions of Website Aesthetics With a Quantification of Perceived Visual Complexity and Colorfulness - hey, they’re researchers not copywriters - when I got the hairbrained idea to really take a long, hard look at the people who make the claims that we pass judgement about a website in 7 seconds, or 4 seconds or the blink of an eye. I’ve been using statistics like this time and again, but now it’s time to see if these researches are heretics, gadflies and charlatans.
They’re not. Harvard, by all accounts, is a reputable institution. They might not possess the ability to draft engaging titles for their research, in fact, this one is downright off putting, but I do trust their findings. The most important revelation in the Harvard study is that it verified many of the studies prior to it that have clearly found that first impressions regarding a website can literally be measured in milliseconds. I also found it interesting that adults 45 and older preferred sites with low visual complexity, and that study participants found the websites of Webby Award winners, no more appealing than websites that were not award winners.
In a study conducted by Carlton University in Ottawa, Canada that was reported in the Journal Behaviour & Technology, the findings were equally conclusive. Researchers found that aesthetic opinions were formed in 50 milliseconds and a “halo effect” resulted in lasting impressions, good or bad, about a website. Finally, an eye movement tracking study by Missouri University of Science & Technology, found that it takes two-tenths of a second to form a website first impression.
Other than the fact that you better have a killer home page, what does all of this mean? First, you better focus on your load times because we’re a downright impatient lot. Second, if you’re creating three home page concepts, for instance, treat them like flash cards and get some immediate reactions from your specific audience segment. Third, website design is far too important to leave up to just the designers. It’s going to require a team of strategists, copywriters (website copywriters that is), designers, salespeople and key audience types to get the home page right the first time.