At some point you will click on a link to a website, then after the quickest of glances, you know that either you don’t like or it is not what you are after. You instantly click your back button and go looking elsewhere.
You didn’t have enough time to read the copy and process the information on the website so it must have been something else, something more immediate.
We form first impressions of the people and things we encounter in our daily lives in an incredibly short timeframe.
We know the first impression a website’s design creates is crucial in capturing users’ interest. In less than 50 milliseconds (0.05 seconds), users build a “gut feeling”, This helps them decide whether they will stay on the site or hit the back button. This first impression depends on many factors: structure, colours, the amount of text, spacing, symmetry, the fonts used and more.
A study by Google investigated how users’ first impressions of websites are influenced by two design factors:
- Visual complexity – how complex the visual design of a website looks
- Prototypicality – how representative a design looks for a certain category of websites
The study showed that users strongly prefer website designs that look both simple (low complexity) and familiar (high prototypicality). This means if you’re designing a website, you’ll want to consider both factors. Designs that contradict what users typically expect of a website may hurt users’ first impression and damage their expectations.
