Snap Judgments
Well, I’m making up for a few quiet weeks with a smattering of quick hit posts (and, maybe one longer one…we’ll see). I ran into a post on Seth Godin’s blog about how quickly people judge your website and I just had to post this. Seth points to a recent article: Web users judge sites in the blink of an eye on news @ nature.com. Apparently, we have about 50 milliseconds to impress users. Yes, that’s 50 milliseconds…ouch.
I knew people could make some quick assessments - I mean at our core, we are just fantastic pattern matchers as Ray Kurzweil explains in this recent interview found on ACM Ubiquity (I’m going to have to, ahh, borrow The Singularity is Near from my dad…and if you really want to bend your mind a bit, check out his website). Anyway, if you’ve read the book Blink (and I plan to - thanks in no small part to Ted Neward’s recommendation. You may want to read Eric Freeman’s review on Creating Passionate Users as well) Malcolm Gladwell explores snap judgments. But 50 milliseconds - that’ll keep people like me up at night!
January 18th, 2006 at 9:14 pm
[…] Blog time must be like, well, cat years (we don’t currently have a dog around the house…) and you’ve got to love the echo chamber that is the blogosphere (have I been Dugg yet? Or is it Digged?). Nearly 48 hours have passed since I talked about Snap Judgments and two of the blogs I track have commented on the topic (if you visit Seth’s post you’ll see I wasn’t the only one to reflect on it!). First, Christine Perfetti of UIE chimed in with this piece that quotes the same article Seth did. However, she provides a bit more depth - and I have to agree with her assessment concerning the implications of the findings. That said, since reading Don Norman’s Emotional Design, I do think aesthetics matter quite a bit. […]