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The Internet Science

Web Users Judge Sites in the Blink of an Eye 233

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the judging-a-book-by-its-cover dept.
dogbolter writes "Nature.com is reporting on a study by Canadian researcher Gitte Lindgaard of Carleton University that visitors to a webpage can make up their minds about the quality of the page within just 50 milliseconds." From the article: "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. The discovery came as a surprise to some experts. "My colleagues believed it would be impossible to really see anything in less than 500 milliseconds," says Gitte Lindgaard of Carleton University in Ottawa, who has published the research in the journal Behaviour and Information Technology. Instead they found that impressions were made in the first 50 milliseconds of viewing."
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Web Users Judge Sites in the Blink of an Eye More

Web Users Judge Sites in the Blink of an Eye

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  • dupe (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 17, 2006 @06:35AM (#14489165)
    I knew within 50 nanoseconds that this was a dupe.

    • Re: dupe (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Black Parrot ( 19622 ) *
      The pathetic thing is that they had the story up with the "notify the on-duty editor if you see any problems with this article" for a while before opening it up for comments, and it still got posted.

      • Re: dupe (Score:2, Interesting)

        by xtracto ( 837672 )
        And the most pathetic thing is that, I knew I have seen this story before, but it was not on slashdot...

        it was on Digg: Two days ago [digg.com].

        Now, because I do not want to have tens of comments bashing digg, I just have to say that I still prefer slashdot because of the summaries (digg articles never have decent summaries) and the comments (digg comments are never insightful).
    • i thought it was still yesterday

  • yesterdays news (Score:4, Informative)

    by bobby1234 ( 860820 ) on Tuesday January 17, 2006 @06:35AM (#14489170)
    literally yesterdays news http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/01/1 6/0558244 [slashdot.org]

  • I was going to RTFA (Score:5, Funny)

    by Iron Fusion ( 591400 ) on Tuesday January 17, 2006 @06:36AM (#14489175)
    But after 50 milliseconds I decided I didn't like the page.

  • Kinda like slashdot editors... (Score:4, Funny)

    by packeteer ( 566398 ) <packeteer@sub d i m e n s i o n . com> on Tuesday January 17, 2006 @06:36AM (#14489176)
    Slashdot editors appear to only spend 50 nanoseconds checking an article before posting.

  • In other news... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Jetekus ( 909605 ) on Tuesday January 17, 2006 @06:36AM (#14489178)
    ...book judged by cover.

  • Coming up next: (Score:5, Funny)

    by Per Wigren ( 5315 ) on Tuesday January 17, 2006 @06:36AM (#14489180) Homepage
    Dark Energy May Be Changing

  • Once again a case for article moderation (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Jugalator ( 259273 ) on Tuesday January 17, 2006 @06:39AM (#14489192) Journal
    *shakes head*

  • Hmm (Score:4, Funny)

    by adinu79 ( 860333 ) on Tuesday January 17, 2006 @06:40AM (#14489195)
    Fresh coffee and fresh dupes ... what more do you want to start the day?

  • Hmm, well. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by omeg ( 907329 ) on Tuesday January 17, 2006 @06:41AM (#14489196)
    I modded yesterday's article, so now I have a chance to say something about this. I think that if the user can't make up his mind whether he likes the site or not in such a short period of time, then the site is obviously broken.

    If I can't tell what a site is about by looking at the way it presents itself, then its design is flawed and I simply don't want to be visiting it anyway.

  • If we can judge webpages this fast... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by BadAnalogyGuy ( 945258 ) <BadAnalogyGuy@gmail.com> on Tuesday January 17, 2006 @06:41AM (#14489199)
    I wonder how this ability to rapidly judge things correlates to everyday life. The 50 millisecond snap decision we make when accessing a website is frequently correct. Websites with poor layout, bad colors, busy graphics, etc. all point to bad websites and typically bad content.

    If we can accurately judge a website in 50 milliseconds, can we also do so with people? Is there something to the snap decision that the group of black youths 20 meters ahead of me are probably trouble? How much should we suppress our natural instinct when it has been shown to be correct for webpages?

    • Re:If we can judge webpages this fast... (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      It hasn't been shown to be correct. No-one seriously thinks that snap decisions are quality decisions. This is a fact to be exploited by websites you don't want to visit to make you think you do want to visit them.

      It won't justify your racism.
    • If we can accurately judge a website in 50 milliseconds, can we also do so with people?

      For the most part, yes. Asshats and idiots are incredibly easy to spot with some experience - and if you're one of those people who'd rather spend your life trying to get something done than indulging the inadequacies of others, you'll develope a grade-A bullshit detector real fast.

      Regardless of rather or not it's actually possible, it's a thing we do anyway, as a filtering mechanism - the odds of some blinged out homie
    • I think if you walk up on a group of any people that you are not familiar enough with to feel comfortable, then you should not be there.

      You can debate within yourself the root of your nervousness but Im going to say most often its lack of knowledge rather than knowledge.

  • Oh, deja-vu ! (Score:5, Funny)

    by javaDragon ( 187973 ) on Tuesday January 17, 2006 @06:43AM (#14489205) Homepage
    It happens when they change somthing in the Matrix, so beware, agents are coming!

  • Posted Yesterday by Zonk (Score:5, Funny)

    by Tim C ( 15259 ) on Tuesday January 17, 2006 @06:44AM (#14489210)
    Grab your +5 comments here [slashdot.org] for some instant karma. Well, the editors dupe the articles, we might as well dupe the comments...

    • Re:Posted Yesterday by Zonk (Score:4, Funny)

      by xtracto ( 837672 ) on Tuesday January 17, 2006 @07:32AM (#14489353) Journal
      Man, I was trying to find a +5 Informative or Interesting comment, but darn... I could only find +5 Funny, ya know, those does not give karma...

      the only one I found was:

      "as a funny offtopic info. [slashdot.org] apparently playboy mirrors files for eclipse, apache, freebsd, and some other stuff! coolness. I fuond this out in some other article clicking around. look"

      The funny thing is that the poster specified his comment was "Funny" and "Offtopic"... and it got modified as +5 Informative haha
      • See that's the thing.. you shouldn't be trying to make comments that win you points. You should make comments when you have something to say. Whether it be because you actually know something useful, have something you think people will enjoy reading, or are just really passionate about the subject.

        Which is why I don't filter out flamebait.
        • If you browse at 'highest scores first', and have 'troll', 'flamebait' and 'offtopic' at +6 bias, you end up with a great slashdot.

          Every story has:

          first post
          GNAA claims victory over....
          (some on-topic groupthink /. crap)
          insightful comments
          insightful and funny trolls that are yet to be moderated

  • paper (Score:2, Interesting)

    by 19061969 ( 939279 )

    I'm just reading the paper myself. More interestingly than judgements being made on gut reaction, it discusses the characteristics of attractive websites. It appears that complexity (as long as it isn't confusing) has no effect on how attractive websites are rated.

    Interestingly, the experiments participants agreed strongly with each other, but there was less agreement between them as a group, and a separate group of "experts".

    Perhaps the moral of the story is: don't bother with usability analysis - get

  • Question (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Fiachra06 ( 945611 ) * on Tuesday January 17, 2006 @06:47AM (#14489220) Journal
    I may be asking for it here but I always wondered this. I've been reading /. for years but only recently started posting and my question is, why do some people get so angry about dupes? They can be a bit annoying, yes but I've read some really horrible and insulting remaks to the editors in the past because of dupes. I mean people seem furious. It's like the editors kicked their children and stole the ice-cream while delivering the household bills. Have I missed something that makes this crime so heinous.

    • Re:Question (Score:5, Funny)

      by Antony.S ( 813668 ) on Tuesday January 17, 2006 @06:51AM (#14489229)
      Have I missed something that makes this crime so heinous.

      Yes but don't worry, it'll be posted again soon

    • Re:Question (Score:4, Informative)

      by Sockatume ( 732728 ) on Tuesday January 17, 2006 @06:51AM (#14489231)
      Dupes imply that slashdot submitters don't actually bother to read Slashdot. They also spread comments between two news stories which is just a pain in the ass and leads to a lot of redundancy.

      • Re:Question (Score:4, Insightful)

        by mysticwhiskey ( 569750 ) <mystic_whiskey@hotm a i l . c om> on Tuesday January 17, 2006 @07:06AM (#14489282)
        Dupes imply that slashdot submitters don't actually bother to read Slashdot

        It's not the submitter's fault, rather the editors who post the story submissions.

        • Re:Question (Score:2, Insightful)

          by Anonymous Coward
          It probably is a PITA for the editors to weed out all the redundancy though. All we read are the stories that make it. Imagine reading 10x the stories (most of them alike), and then having to remember which one you actually posted to slashdot. That being said, a 0-day dupe or a yester-day dupe really shows lack of communication between ./ editors...
          • Imagine reading 10x the stories (most of them alike), and then having to remember which one you actually posted to slashdot.

            Imagine using the site search to find out in 2 seconds without having to remember. Imagine using the spellcheck that's built in to the system. Imagine verifying that links work. Imagine that you set up a cache so people can see the story.... Imagine you just pick six stories at random and go back to playing games.

      • Dupes imply that slashdot submitters don't actually bother to read Slashdot.

        Just because a story gets multiple submissions from people (as most do), and editors end up posting two of them from the queue instead of just one, doesn't mean the submitter of the duped post doesn't read Slashdot. It just means the editors aren't paying attention to what they're posting from the queue. The submitter probably sent his story before the other was posted.
      • Well, I for one hope that's a 50 NANO-second pain-in-the-ass, and not a 50-second, or your 52nd pain in the ass, or your 52nd, 50-second pain in the ass.

        It only took me 50 nano-seconds to think this shit up, but a little over 50 seconds to type it. I think I need a hand:

        http://www.collectoybles.com.au/catalog/images/ter minator_sideshow_endo_arm.jpg [collectoybles.com.au]

        DUPED YA!

    • Re:Question (Score:3, Insightful)

      by ceeam ( 39911 )
      Well, actually I don't have much problems with dupes on some _important_ topics. Stuff that matters, you know. It's when such ... uhm, how do I say it... crap snippets get _duped_ whereas many, many readers think they should not have been posted even the first time, it's this that makes us somewhat angry.

    • Re:Question (Score:3, Insightful)

      by BenjyD ( 316700 )
      I think it's frustration, really. Dupes happen quite frequently and every time potential easy solutions are pointed out by readers.

      Most people are only here for the discussion these days, anyway, the article summaries are generally either poorly written, incorrect or confused.

      • Re:Question (Score:4, Funny)

        by pmc ( 40532 ) on Tuesday January 17, 2006 @07:22AM (#14489322) Homepage
        the article summaries are generally either poorly written, incorrect or confused

        That is very unfair. Some manage to be all three.

        But, in reply the the GPP, the reason that people get worked up is that it serves as a demonstration that the editors don't appear to care. They don't read the site, and they don't even bother to read the "problems with the article" e-mails that people send in. It is possible that dupes are a deliberate ploy to generate page hits - after all who can be that consistents careless - but this would be even worse. Or it could be just plain incompetence.

        None reflect well on the site.
        • Or it could be that the poor editors who are wading through so many submissions lose track of what's been approved to go online recently. There is more than one editor, you know, so it would be easy to miss something that another editor has already done.

          In all seriousness, maybe Google's next big solution should be a way of finding commonality in Slashdot submissions so that editors can easily sort through them all and easily determine if anything similar has been accepted recently.

          • Re:Question (Score:2, Insightful)

            by Flaming Babies ( 904475 )

            Or it could be that the poor editors who are wading through so many submissions lose track of what's been approved to go online recently. There is more than one editor, you know, so it would be easy to miss something that another editor has already done.

            I don't buy it.
            There's a search function. Editors can use it too.
            In the 2 hours between new articles, how tough would it have been to type 'judge 50 ms' into the search?
            I understand they have to wade through a lot of submissions,
            but a 10 second check a

            • You have an excellent point, except that "50ms" finds nothing (as opposed to "50 milliseconds") and "judge" returns more than a few legal articles. Finding appropriate keywords to search on is not a straightforward task, especially in the presence of typos.
      • "I think it's frustration, really. Dupes happen quite frequently and every time potential easy solutions are pointed out by readers."

        That doesn't really answer the question, though. What is so frustrating about dupes? "I've read this before!!! What a gyp! This causes me physical paaaaaaaaaaaaaaain!!!"

        I have a much simpler solution: Scroll past the dupe. Don't click on the comments button. Don't click reply. Don't click the D, U, P, E, or ! keys. Don't click submit. Don't embarrass yourself by being
    • Actually, there are a few website owners out there who enjoy the buzz of a slashdotting, but twice in two days?
    • Answers?
      Here are a few reasons that spring to mind. I don't think they warrant the responses that the duplicate stories get, however some people get fired up a whole lot easier than I do =)

      Lots of people here pay for subscriptions [I don't, however]
      If you're paying for a subscription, it removes the ads from a certain number of articles you read.
      If you hit a dupe, and actually click on it, as anyone would have to in order to post, then you've paid twice to remove the ads from one story.

      Number of Stories.
      Vas
      • Sanity:
        When it feels like you're having deja vu and you're questioning yourself if you've seen the story before: have you gone crazy? I swear I've seen that one before! Where is it? *Older Stories* Ugh, where is that story? I know you're here somewhere! How long ago would that have been posted? Maybe it was the first story the last time I checked . . . etc.
    • Because we want Slashdot to be better.

      That simple, really, and we can't understand why the powers that be wouldn't jump at this opportunity of making it better.
    • Well, now, I wouldn't judge the remarks as all *THAT* hot. Most of the comments in here seem to be humorous. Keep in mind (a) some people actually *pay* for membership here (I don't), so would be a little more entitled to gripe when they didn't get their money's worth.

      Let's face it, it does show gross neglect. How many of the group blogs that you know have a problem with duplicated effort? How many websites, period, with a group maintaining them do this? When's the last time you saw this on another news s

    • Re:Question (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Tim C ( 15259 ) on Tuesday January 17, 2006 @07:57AM (#14489417)
      There are a number of reasons; here are some, in no particular order:

      1) There are people whose job it is to edit and approve submissions; these people are paid to do this. Some people find it annoying when people are apparently not doing a very good job of something.

      2) Every dupe posted is a potential new and interesting article rejected.

      3) Some people pay a subscription to the site; some of these people feel (rightly or wrongly) that as they're paying money, they have a right to expect a certain level of quality and profesionalism, and feel that the number and frequency of dupes does not meet this level.

      4) It's primarily a technical problem, and the audience is tech-heavy; thus many of us can think of (and sometimes suggest) potential solutions, and it's frustrating that nothing seems to be being done about it

      5) Many of us think (rightly or wrongly) that the major strength of the site is in the discussions that the articles generate - that is, in the comments that we post. Some people think (rightly or wrongly) that as they therefore provide most of the value of the site, they should have some kind of say in how it works, or at least have their concerns and complaints acknowledged.

      6) As you note, there are many, many complaints about dupe articles, yet I have not seen any official reply to any of these. While it's entirely possible that I've just missed it, it does seem that our comments are falling on deaf ears. People don't like to feel ignored.

      Now, there's no excuse for all the vitriol, but some people are really getting frustrated about things. Between the lack of any apparent action or even response about dupes (and **Beatles-Beatles posts, apparent moderation abuse, Roland P, etc), some people are over-reacting and lashing out. The rest of us, well, we just wish that something would be done about it, or at least that there would be a public announcement (or a even FAQ entry) stating the official position of the editors, and what (if anything) they intend to do about it.

      • Re:Question (Score:5, Informative)

        by jdavidb ( 449077 ) on Tuesday January 17, 2006 @09:31AM (#14489740) Homepage Journal

        4) It's primarily a technical problem, and the audience is tech-heavy; thus many of us can think of (and sometimes suggest) potential solutions, and it's frustrating that nothing seems to be being done about it

        We can at least check what Taco has said [slashdot.org] when this has been brought up recently [slashdot.org]

        6) As you note, there are many, many complaints about dupe articles, yet I have not seen any official reply to any of these. While it's entirely possible that I've just missed it, it does seem that our comments are falling on deaf ears. People don't like to feel ignored.

        Feel better about #6 now? At least a little? I mean, I realize Rob may be completely off base, or even lying or something. But that is his official reply to your #4. And it's been the official reply for quite some time now [slashdot.org], actually, although I think the recent comment is more informative.

        Am I the only one who read Taco's entire posting history the day of that "meta-story" about slashdot, where he actually got down and answered our questions for once?

        • I don't particularly mind dupes, but it's just a little hard to believe they're actually doing anything. As several people have pointed out, other similar blogs don't seem to suffer from this problem.

          In fact, I just typed the text from the single link in this article into the Slashdot search box. That is, the text "50 milliseconds." The first hit on this search was the previous story and the text was in the link text of that article.

          It is just hard to swallow the claim that they actually give a damn when
        • Considering that they are being paid to run the site, and we are not, (In fact, some people pay to read the site. Suckers!) it seems a little bit ridiculous for them to say that the only way they'll do something about the problem is it we do it for them, don't you think?

          • Considering that you don't know how much they're paid, and considering you haven't personally tried to code a dup eliminator and thus have no idea how much it would cost, it seems a little ridiculous to say that it should be fixed since they are paid. Rob's real point is to challenge people to prove it is trivial by coding it. He's claiming it's not trivial. If you think it's that cheap to create, prove it. I'm speculating that there's a reason why you can't, though I haven't drawn a firm conclusion on


        • Feel better about #6 now? At least a little? I mean, I realize Rob may be completely off base, or even lying or something. But that is his official reply to your #4.
          Not really, since Taco's reply is the same, and as lame as ever. The response is essentially "we don't care about dupes, if you do, fix it yourself". Many people could probbably fix it, but Slashdot is a commercial site, not a free community project. Why should I fix Taco's crappy system when he could pay someone to do it?

          The entire problem i
    • The editors sit there, making a nice salary off us. They have only one thing they are required to do in the whole world, it's not very hard, it's something they enjoy, and for everything else their time is their own, they can enjoy themselves enormously. But they can't even do this one thing properly.
    • Many of us are just so baffled as to how the hell the "editors" can make the same mistake so many times. I read many other blogs that have multiple editors but don't recall them ever making duplicate posts, certinaly nowhere near as many as Slashdot. It's not that bloody hard, surely?

  • Wow.. I must be blinking fast.. (Score:3, Funny)

    by Pranjal ( 624521 ) on Tuesday January 17, 2006 @06:51AM (#14489230)
    ..I have already judged this article twice!
  • It is proven!

    Slasdot editors spend 50 miliseconds before approving stories. No wonder so many dupes...

  • So people can find them amid the flood of dupe reports.
  • I dont know how they tested this (probably with screenshots) but a page never loads within 50ms. In real life the way (speed, layout correct, banners slowing down, etc) a page loads is also imporant.

    The 50ms cant be right how do they even measure such a response you do not click within 50ms.

    Basicly I do not trust this research.

  • Free will is exercised unconsciously (Score:5, Interesting)

    by tehanu ( 682528 ) on Tuesday January 17, 2006 @07:17AM (#14489311)
    You know this idea that people make judgements in the first 50ms before you can really gain a conscious impression of it (though probably something flashes in your subconcious) remind me of one of the entries in the "Dangerous Ideas" article in Edge (slashdot had it as a story a short while ago) in which Nobel Prize winning biochemist Eric R. Kandel argues that much of what we call "free will" is processed unconsciously without awareness:

    http://www.edge.org/q2006/q06_5.html [edge.org]

    ERIC R. KANDEL
    Biochemist and University Professor, Columbia University; Recipient, The Nobel Prize, 2000; Author, Cellular Basis of Behavior

    Free will is exercised unconsciously, without awareness

    It is clear that consciousness is central to understanding human mental processes, and therefore is the holy grail of modern neuroscience. What is less clear is that much of our mental processes are unconscious and that these unconscious processes are as important as conscious mental processes for understanding the mind. Indeed most cognitive processes never reach consciousness.

    As Sigmund Freud emphasized at the beginning of the 20th century most of our perceptual and cognitive processes are unconscious, except those that are in the immediate focus of our attention. Based on these insights Freud emphasized that unconscious mental processes guide much of human behavior.

    Freud's idea was a natural extension of the notion of unconscious inference proposed in the 1860s by Hermann Helmholtz, the German physicist turned neural scientist. Helmholtz was the first to measure the conduction of electrical signals in nerves. He had expected it to be as the speed of light, fast as the conduction of electricity in copper cables, and found to his surprise that it was much slower, only about 90m sec. He then examined the reaction time, the time it takes a subject to respond to a consciously a perceived stimulus, and found that it was much, much slower than even the combined conduction times required for sensory and motor activities.

    This caused Helmholz to argue that a great deal of brain processing occurred unconsciously prior to conscious perception of an object. Helmholtz went on to argue that much of what goes on in the brain is not represented in consciousness and that the perception of objects depends upon "unconscious inferences" made by the brain, based on thinking and reasoning without awareness. This view was not accepted by many brain scientists who believed that consciousness is necessary for making inferences. However, in the 1970s a number of experiments began to accumulate in favor of the idea that most cognitive processes that occur in the brain never enter consciousness.

    Perhaps the most influential of these experiments were those carried out by Benjamin Libet in 1986. Libet used as his starting point a discovery made by the German neurologist Hans Kornhuber. Kornhuber asked volunteers to move their right index finger. He then measured this voluntary movement with a strain gauge while at the same time recording the electrical activity of the brain by means of an electrode on the skull. After hundreds of trials, Kornhuber found that, invariably, each movement was preceded by a little blip in the electrical record from the brain, a spark of free will! He called this potential in the brain the "readiness potential" and found that it occurred one second before the voluntary movement.

    Libet followed up on Kornhuber's finding with an experiment in which he asked volunteers to lift a finger whenever they felt the urge to do so. He placed an electrode on a volunteer's skull and confirmed a readiness potential about one second before the person lifted his or her finger. He then compared the time it took for the person to will the movement with the time of the readiness potential.

    Amazingly, Libet found that the readiness potential appeared not after, but 200 milliseconds before a person felt the urge to move his or her finger! Thus by merely

  • Comic Sans (Score:3, Insightful)

    by BibelBiber ( 557179 ) on Tuesday January 17, 2006 @07:40AM (#14489371)
    Whenever I see Comic Sans it's pretty much worthless on academic information. Problem is, many unis still think it's cool to use it for application forms such as family accomodation. It's hard to take such things serious.

    • I once had a course in which the papers where mandated to be Word 2000, written in comic sans 12.

      I complained to the teacher, thinking it was the whim of an idiot in the correction staff, but obviously, as soon as I implied "who can be as stupid as to like comic sans?" I knew that it was the professor's personal order :)

      Fortunately he found it funny that comic sans had caused such uproar (I wasn't the only one complaining).

    • Whenever I see Comic Sans it's pretty much worthless on academic information.

      Who the hell cares what font a webpage has been written in? It's not a Word document, you just check "Always Use My Fonts" in Firefox, and you never see it again. That's the first thing I do with any browser.
      • Who the hell cares what font a webpage has been written in? It's not a Word document, you just check "Always Use My Fonts" in Firefox, and you never see it again. That's the first thing I do with any browser.

        Actually, it's the first thing I do when I get a Word document too. Change it all to Georgia 12 pt, instead of bold Arial 14 or, yes, sometimes even Comic Sans.

  • I think leaving this for the editors to solve is not getting us anywhere. Maybe a Firefox extension to filter out dupes is the way out.

    The question is how does a program recognise a dupe? My first guess would be to verify the links in the story intro against a list of already posted ones. I would not go for read links as not that many people read the articles first.

    Any other ideas?

    • Just a test:
      curl http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/01/1 7/0342224 | grep -i dupe | wc -l

      39

      (beware of the space)

      My guess is that if the word 'dupe' appears more than 10 times, you can fairly reliably mark it as a dupe. Maybe write a firefox slashdot 'dupe' counter that shows the number of times some (above -1) comment calls dupe.

  • Ah (Score:2)

    by squoozer ( 730327 )

    So that would be why none of my websites seem to do very well. Sigh.

  • Is this a sign of intelligence? Or is it a sign of the instant-gratification age?

    You must read what is on the page to judge how good or bad it is, in my opinion.
  • So how could i judge it within the first 50 ms?

    Browser: "<html ..."
    me: "No. I don't like this page."
  • The dupes aren't going away, deal with it. You're all offtopic, where's my bitchstick... WTF article is actually saying is that people judge on how pretty/attractive it is - not on the actual content. This is why new releases of shitty software are usually wrapped in the equivalent of a sexy paint-job, and why Baywatch was so popular.
  • For the normal point+drool masses, that does not surprise me.

    For those who are actually looking for *content* as opposed to shiny things, well... thats different.

    smash.

  • This doesn't strike me as any surprise. A major part of a website's quality, in my opinion, is the layout. If it's 80% images (which will not be loaded, but which give a distinctive patten as the page starts loading), it'll often be a poorly laid out site, often stuffed with ads. If the text puts up and fills the screen, then it's a text only or mostly text site, and unless the text is an awful font or color scheme, I'll like it.

    All this is simple enough to be a reflex, and I do hit Alt+Left very, very fast
  • I wonder if that 50ms flash judgment is at all affected by the length of time it takes to initially load the page for viewing. What good is a 50ms impression if you end up sitting there waiting for 10-20 seconds as each element progressively loads? By the time the page is done, very often any positive initial impression will definitely have changed.
  • I'd like to get my hand on their web browser that loads pages in less than 50 milliseconds!
  • Problem: Web users read and ignore stories in the blink of an eye.

    Solution: Slashdot editors post a story a number of times to make sure it gets the attention it deserves.

  • Nature article has some interesting conclusions (Score:3, Informative)

    by sweetnjguy29 ( 880256 ) on Tuesday January 17, 2006 @01:17PM (#14491458) Journal
    The Nature article suggests some golden rules of creating a good-looking website:

    1) Strictly limited graphics limited to a single eye-catching image.
    "It's not about getting as much stuff on the page as possible," he says.

    2) A "puritan" approach to web pages which get information across in the quickest, simplest way possible.

    3)Make sure that your web pages load quickly.
  • That must be the amount of time for popups to open up.

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