You have 50 milliseconds: what research says about first impressions online

Visitors judge how a website looks faster than they can blink, and that snap judgement colours everything that follows. What the studies found, and what to do about it.

Before anyone reads your headline, they have already decided whether your website looks right. That is not a design cliché. It has been measured, and the numbers are startlingly small.

Faster than a blink

In 2006, a team led by Gitte Lindgaard at Carleton University ran three studies on how quickly people form an opinion of a web page's visual appeal. Participants rated homepages shown for half a second, and in the final study for just 50 milliseconds as well. Ratings made after 50 milliseconds closely tracked those made after half a second. The authors' conclusion became the title of their paper: web designers have about 50 milliseconds to make a good first impression.

Six years later, researchers from the University of Basel and Google pushed the exposure time lower still. They showed people screenshots of real websites for as little as 17 milliseconds. Even at that speed, two qualities shaped how attractive a site seemed: how visually complex it was, and how closely it matched what people expect a site of its kind to look like. For comparison, Google's write-up notes that an average blink takes between 100 and 400 milliseconds.

Simple and familiar wins

The direction of those results is clear. Sites with high visual complexity were judged less beautiful, even when their layout was familiar. Sites that looked unlike others in their category were judged uglier, even when they were simple. People strongly preferred designs that were both simple and familiar.

The second finding surprises people. Originality has its place, but a professional services firm whose site looks nothing like a professional services firm makes visitors work harder, before they have decided to give it any effort at all.

Looks change how usable a site feels

First impressions do not stay in their box. In 1995, Masaaki Kurosu and Kaori Kashimura of Hitachi's design centre tested 26 versions of a cash machine interface with 252 people. How attractive a layout looked was more strongly related to how easy people thought it was to use than to how easy it actually was. Nielsen Norman Group calls this the aesthetic-usability effect: people assume that good-looking things work better.

There is a limit. Nielsen Norman Group stresses that attractive design can make people forgive small usability problems, not large ones. A beautiful page that hides the contact button still loses the enquiry.

What to do with it

• Cut visual noise from the first screen. One message, one image and one action read faster than six competing panels.
• Look like what you are. Study the best sites in your category and meet the conventions people expect, then stand out through words, photography and detail.
• Spend on the first screen. It is the only part of the site everyone sees, and it is judged before it is read.
• Back the impression up. Pages must also be fast and easy to use, or the goodwill a good first look buys runs out quickly.

None of this means style over substance. It means substance only gets its chance if the first glance does not end the visit.