Like the look of our website Whatever the answer, the chances are you made your mind up within the first twentieth of a second. A study by researchers in Canada has shown that the snap decisions Internet users make about the quality of a web page have a lasting impact on their opinions.
We all know that first impressions count, but this study shows that the brain can make flash judgments almost as fast as the eye can take in the information. "My colleagues believed it would be impossible to really see anything in less than 500 milliseconds," says Gitte Lindgaard of Carleton University in Ottawa. Instead they found that impressions were made in the first 50 milliseconds of viewing.
Lindgaard and her team presented volunteers with the briefest glimpses of web pages previously rated as being either easy on the eye or particularly unpleasant, 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 shot, their decisions tallied well with judgments made after a longer period of examination.
In the crowded and competitive world of the web, companies hoping to make millions from e-commerce should take notice." 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 warns.
For a typical commercial website, 60% of traffic comes from search engines such as Google. This makes a user’s first impression even more critical. The lasting effect of first impressions is known to psychologists as the "halo effect": if you can snare people with an attractive design, they are more likely to overlook other minor faults with the site, and may rate its actual content more favorably.
This is because of "cognitive bias". 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. "It’s awfully scary stuff, but the tendency to jump to conclusions is far more widespread than we realize".
These days, enlightened web users want to see a "puritan" approach. It’s about getting information across in the quickest, st way possible. For this reason, many commercial websites now follow a fairly regular set of rules. For example, westerners tend to look at the top-left corner of a page first, so that’s where the company logo should go. And most users also expect to see a search function in the top right.
Of course, the other golden rule is to make sure that your web pages load quickly, otherwise your customers might not stick around long enough to make that coveted first impression. "That can be the difference between big business and no business".
The underlined phrase" halo effect" (Line 3, Paragraph 5) probably means ______