A new study described in Nature magazine indicates that web readers may be more fickle than some of us would like to think. Key findings:

• Site quality impressions were made in the first 50 milliseconds of viewing.
• “Even though the images flashed up for just 50 milliseconds, roughly the duration of a single frame of standard television footage, their verdicts tallied well with judgements made after a longer period of scrutiny. “
• “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.”
• These days, enlightened web users want to see a “puritan” approach, Caudron adds. It’s about getting information across in the quickest, simplest 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.

This article has made me look over my site again; some changes will be appearing over the next couple of days.

Related: I go back and forth all the time about whether sidebars look and work best on the left of right hand side of a blog. This “visual attention heat map” from Eyetools Research indicates that blog viewers tend to ignore content in the middle of the right hand side. But it’s hard to know whether that’s indication that the pictured blog is mistaken to put its advertising there or whether the location is ignored because that’s where the advertising is!

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site_design, design, visualization, judgement, traffic, stickyness, attention

Half for kicks and half to make this blog a more user friendly experience for folks new to the medium, I’ve recorded a 4 minute audio tour of the various features and resources on this site. I’ll be putting it on top of the sidebar for awhile to see how it works for folks.

Play Site Tour

The idea is that visitors can click the play button and listen without leaving the site. I think this kind of thing has a lot of potential, even if not in this particular context. I honestly don’t know if this is a good idea or not – but part of what I like to do with my own site is experiment with ideas before I recommend them to clients! In this case it may be a problem that if you click on any of the links discussed in the tour, a new page will load and the audio will stop. That’s not ideal.

I recorded the intro in Garage Band on my Mac, then transferred it over to iTunes and converted it to MP3. I put music in the background from the Podsafe Music Network. This song is Bill DeRome’s The ending before the beginning – instrumental.

I then uploaded it onto my webspace and created the play button link using the code I wrote about at Mp3 Blogs and Playing Sound Within Your Site.

If you feel inclined to give it a click and listen while you bop around the site here, let me know what you think.

So with some help from my friends at The Portland Internet Company, I think I’ve got some resource links in a fixed position on the left side of my blog. (Check out what they’re doing for MySpace profiles).

I added links to resource pages about tagging tools and Attention Streams.

Perhaps most interesting, I added a page that contains my working definition of Web 2.0, some key resources on the topic and an automated dynamic news wire of recent definitions of Web 2.0 from around the blogosphere. I like that page.

I’ve added more visible links to my introductions:

• Blogging Basics
• Tagging (both social bookmarking and adding tags to the ends of your blog posts)
• What is RSS?

I hope that these links will increase the usability of my blog, especially regarding the kinds of introductory information that tends to get the most traction with readers. I believe that sidebars don’t get looked at as much as they could, so I hope that by putting some key links outside my full sidebar and putting them in a fixed position they will be seen and used more.

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blogging, introduction, rss, tagging, blogs, web2.0, layout, usability, sidebar