Create Sites With Impact

First impressions count and with the clock ticking, make sure your site has impact.

You’ve got 50 milliseconds – just one twentieth of a second – to impress us. If you aren’t sure how long that is, go and get a stopwatch (or use your mobile) and time it. According to recent research, it’s the length of time it takes site visitors to decide if your site has anything of value for them. Scary isn’t it? It doesn’t matter how great your navigation, or how popular your online store, if you don’t make that all-important, top-quality, first impression, you’re history. This issue Karl Hodge shows you how to beat the clock with tips and tweaks from web professionals...

It’s long been assumed that web users make their mind up about sites in a short space of time. Some sources say you’ve got twenty seconds to make an impact, others a more speedy ten. A recent series of studies by academics at Careleton University in Ottawa, Canada suggests, however, that the allimportant first impression is made in less than one tick of the clock. They flashed a series of sites in front of test subjects and asked them to rate the pages for visual appeal. The finished study concluded that visitors were able to make their mind up about whether they like a site’s home page in just 50 milliseconds. That’s one twentieth of a second.

If you’re surprised, you’re not the only one. Even Gitte Lindgaard, Director of the Human-Oriented Technology Lab that carried out the research had set the bar much higher; “My colleagues believed it would be impossible to really see anything in less than 500 milliseconds,” she told the journal Nature. “Unless the first impression is favourable, visitors will be out of your site before they even know that you might be offering more than your competitors,” says Lindgaard. It’s enough to make your head spin.

There’s more too. Cathy Dudek, a researcher who worked on the third phase of the study, told us there was a ‘high consistency’ between the sites rated as visually appealing by test subjects. “In study one, the 25 most appealing home pages were also the 25 most appealing in study two, and the same was true for the 25 least appealing home pages,” said Dudek.

If that’s the case, then perhaps visual appeal – the measure that was common to all three phases of the study – might be something you can predict and even design for. John Knight, Director at usability research centre User-Lab (www.user-lab.com) suggests there may be something in that hypothesis, “You can probably generalise an aesthetic preference to a specific audience,” he told us. Interestingly, there were also matches between the visual appeal of a site and how several other characteristics were rated. These included design, layout, colour use and ‘imagination’.

While the researchers at Carleton couldn’t venture any conclusions beyond those already in their research, Cathy Dudek admitted these were interesting results. “It opens lots of doors, and should inspire further research,” she said.

What this study shows academically, many good designers already knew intuitively; you really don’t have long to make your mark. To create a positive impact with your home page and site there are some broad rules you can and should follow – and the basics are easy to identify. Your pages should look and work the same way on all target platforms. Sticking to W3C standards (www.w3c.org) to ensure consistency helps, but browser quirks should be taken into consideration. We’re pretty sure by now that slow loading Flash splash pages are a big turn off – even in broadband Britain. “Can you imagine the BBC with a huge spinning globe intro page and music that you were forced to experience or click to surf through every time you visited the home page?” asks Tim Gibbon, communications director of WebTrafficIQ (www.webtrafficiq.com).

We also know that people expect and, indeed, should get clear navigation cues within the first half of the page. But what about more esoteric issues? What about those elements – design, layout and colour – that the Carleton study identified as being so important?

In the eye of the beholder
“What makes a visually appealing site is often in the eye of the beholder, but there are some general rules of thumb,” says Jason Arber, co-founder at Pixelsurgeon. “As the Canadian study shows, users have become very adept at deciding whether they like a site in less than a second. The eye scans the page from top left to bottom right, looking for visual clues, so having extremely clear navigation and a clean layout will work in your favour. The brain can process images very quickly, so a couple of wellchosen pictures will help, as will a complimentary colour scheme”.

This advice should be taken in context and sites designed with a specific audience and its needs in mind. “If your web site is for a company specialising in relaxation techniques and the site is bright pink, you’ll find your visitors quickly hitting the back button,” says Arber. This is an appropriate example, as colour is especially important when thinking of the initial impact a site will make on the user. Whether you choose a bold statement or a more subdued approach may depend on your audience, but either way, colour choices will have a profound influence. “Colours work online in the same way that they do in print,” says Arber. “Certain bright colours can quickly draw the eye, while more neutral colours are calming and sophisticated. Unlike print, however, once a site is live a quick tweak of the style sheet can create a whole new colour scheme”.

For more on conducting your own usability tests, check out the US government’s own usability site www.usability.gov/methods/usability_testing.html

Web design evolves over time; it’s not a static thing. Pages with silver backgrounds were all the rage in 1996. At the beginning of the noughties, sliding Flash navigation bars could be found on all the hippest sites. Does following these trends make your site more appealing? “By coincidence or design, many “Web 2.0” sites favour a stripped down look,” says Jason Arber, “There’s clean typography and simple neutral colours, such as dark greys for text. Because these sites are leading the way with technology, expect their look and feel to permeate the entire web.”

We’ve noticed a further trend among Web 2.0 sites: rounded corners and distinct, colour-delineated content boxes. Visitors love sites like Flickr and Technorati for their content and design, so if you use similar visual elements in your layout it’s reasonable to assume that some of that success will rub off on your site. Be careful of trying to be too ‘contemporary’, though. This year’s Google may be next year’s Altavista. Trends age extremely quickly, while classic design lasts.

While the Carleton study concentrated on visual appeal, content plays its part in making a positive impact. In fact, the research found a symbiotic relationship between the two. The tests discovered a ‘halo effect’, where content on pages that were deemed aesthetically appealing by the participants was more highly rated than page designs they didn’t like.

John Knight makes an interesting suggestion. Sometimes it’s best not to saturate your front page with content. Although it’s important to clearly state what your site provides in a tone and manner that’s appropriate to your audience, curiosity is also key. For maximum impact, you want to draw users into the site – not give them everything on the front page. That means linking to content in an eye catching way, rather than running your big stories or listing your full catalogue on your home page.

Measuring success
Although these design tips can be applied broadly, there’s one rule that overrides and informs them all; know your user. “People tend to think of other folk’s taste being like theirs,” says John Knight, “That’s not the case”. Different people and different audiences have different tastes, desires, needs and aspirations. While you may be able to generalise about those tastes at the prototype stage, there’s only one way to find out if you’ve got it right for certain; and that’s to test your site.

There are two distinct types of research you can undertake. You’ll start with usability testing before you launch. We’ve got some great tips elsewhere in this article, but the first thing you should know is that it’s not brain surgery – anyone can put together a usability study. “It’s probably possible to hash together a guerrilla version of the Canadian study,” says Gerred Blyth, Head of Consulting at Human-Computer Interaction experts Amberlight (www.amber-light.co.uk). “Take a screen shot of the home page and make a PowerPoint presentation that advances the slide after a fraction of a second. Put the slide show in front of your participants and record their reactions.”

Though your home page is important, don’t forget the rest of your site. “A large number of visitors arrive through internal landing pages. It’s equally important to usability test these journeys and ensure that users are driven into other areas,” says Blyth.

With template based content management and external CSS is becoming the norm for page building and layout, it’s easier than ever to tweak your site after the fact. You can continue running usability tests after your site has gone live, but now you’ve an additional source of data too – your actual users.

Tim Gibbon explains: “Web analytics software is used to determine and understand how visitors arrive at web sites, how they navigate, where and how they are exiting it and why. It’s one of the first and most crucial factors a web site owner needs to consider when making their web site ‘sticky’ because this creates the relationship and builds a rapport with them,” says Tim.

Agencies like WebtrafficIQ can use their expertise to do this for you, though, there are options for personal pages and outfits on a small budget, too. AWStats is one of our favourite site traffic tools. It’s free, CGI powered and displays the data it gathers about your site traffic in colourful, easy to understand charts and tables.

With all these tweaks and testing guidelines, your site should be as attractive to your punters as pollen is to bees. Hopefully it can do that in the fraction of a second that your user take to make a value judgement about your front page. It’s not all about design, though, the Carleton study deliberately excluded sites that were famous or familiar to the test subjects, so you’ve one last weapon in your arsenal: spin. “Lots of research shows that branding is persuasive in forming favourable impressions,” says Cathy Dudek; “I think it does have an effect”. We think that combining our ninja design tips with a bit of judicious marketing should be everything you need to make your mark.