A team of researchers based at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, has identified how long it takes for the brain to evaluate a website and form an opinion about its content.
This information should be of interest to all companies as the impact of your website's design will fundamentally affect whether surfers will delve further into your site.
Research showed that in a twentieth of a second, the brain will form an opinion about the content of a website. Volunteers were shown fleeting images of websites and were then asked to rate the websites and whether the first impression was favourable.
A positive first impression gave rise to the “halo effect” - leading the volunteers to assume the rest of the site's content to be of good quality and worth a visit.
In a highly competitive market, it might just be worth considering how, in a fraction of a second you may win or lose prospective visitors (and potential business) to your site.
Research published in Behaviour and Information Technology Journal.
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