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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