People who surf the web do not take more than a couple of seconds to decide whether the website is worth it or not, according to recent scientific findings. The decision is often taken in less than a second.
‘My colleagues believed it would be impossible to really see anything in less than 500 milliseconds,’ Nature quoted Gitte Lindgaard of Carleton University in Ottawa, who has published the research in the journal Behavior and Information Technology, as saying about their findings that impressions were made in the first 50 milliseconds of viewing.These findings, the researchers said, should be seriously taken note of by web companies hoping to drive traffic on their sites.
‘Unless the first impression is favorable, visitors will be out of your site before they even know that you might be offering more than your competitors,’ Lindgaard said. And according to Marc Caudron of London web-design agency Pod, the findings make a user's first impression even more critical.
‘You'll get a list of sites, click the top one, and then either say 'I've engaged' and give it a few more seconds, or just go back to Google,’ the journal quoted him, as saying.
And he suggests that to use these findings to their benefit, site owners should ensure that the amount of graphics on the page should be strictly limited, perhaps to a single eye-catching image, and make sure that web pages load quickly, otherwise customers might not stick around long enough to make that coveted first impression.
Edited (ANI)
