The Montoya Herald, a weblog about Blueprint, jQuery, design, music and life, publishing on the web since September 2005. Written by Christian Montoya: developer, designer and entrepreneur.

First impressions count

Posted on January 19, 2006.

If you are in the web design community, you have probably already heard that web users judge websites in the blink of an eye, more specifically, in 50 milliseconds. Let's dissect this.

No matter how fast a user's internet connection is, from dial-up to T1, the only content that loads on a first visit within 50 milliseconds is markup and css. Images, Flash, and client side scripting such as Javascript almost always take at least a second to appear, and for sites that are dependent on this media for appearance, very few users will see this within that 50 millisecond threshold. To give you an example, I can load a site like powazek.com on my lightning fast cable internet connection just after clearing my cache, and the only thing I can see within the first second is the background image, and the text. All of the other images load, one at a time, within the next couple seconds.

We can conclude from this article that large images, Flash content, and Javascript enhancements, that is, all the things we do to our websites to make them pretty, do not affect the first impression a user gets. Therefore, the initial judgements a user makes on a website's appearance are completely dependent upon the layout, colors, typography, and very small images. This is, however, probably a wrong conclusion. The article about this research does not go into depth on how much content users actually saw, or whether they saw the pages loading or preloaded, so it might be that these users make this opinion after the page has loaded completely. It's hard to tell, really, since the article is published in a subscriber only journal, but I think there is room to consider that users may form opinions about websites before all the flair hits the screen. For example, a website that contains a flash movie on the left and basic html on the right could suffer from a bad first impression if the page is ugly, regardless of how nice the flash movie is. This is important, because it proves an oft said piece of advice for designers: you can't just rely on fancy graphics or Flash to impress visitors. You have to consider all aspects of web design.

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2 Comments

1. karmatosed on January 22, 2006

   Reminds me of the old phrase KISS, if you keep it simple but well designed then you will be doing it right for the viewers. Good design isn't about just flourishes and effects, users making judgments that quickly can only point to the need for strong css designs that impact instantly.

2. C Montoya on January 23, 2006

   For the visitors:

   KISS = Keep It Simple Stupid

   Thanks for reminding me of that sound advice.