Does Good Web Design Matter?

50 milliseconds?

People form opinions about the look of your website in 1/20th of a second — as little as 50 milliseconds — according to Canadian researchers. In the blink of an eye, web surfers make nearly instantaneous judgments of a web site’s “visual appeal.” The judgments they form in that short amount of time color how they see your business, and you. Strong visual appeal can even draw attention away from usability issues.

Researchers led by Dr. Gitte Lindgaard at Carleton University in Ontario found that in that short time, people form an impression about credibility and usability which has an impact on continued use or purchase. In fact, they found that even though your site may have superior products, services, or usability, an initial negative impression from a poor or slow design can steer customers towards your competition.

“My colleagues believed it would be impossible to really see anything in less than 500 milliseconds,” Dr. Gitte Lindgaard told Nature, which reported the research Lindgaard published in Behaviour and Information Technology. Yet in as many as 50 ms, people formed judgments about the images they glimpsed. Not surprisingly, young people could glean more information in that time than older study participants.

For a website, good design is a combination of user-friendly architecture, interesting subject presentation and high visual appeal — not things you’ll find in sites that are slapped together hastily. It’s also important that your site seem unique to you, so using the same stock images or off-the-shelf template your competitors have used isn’t a good idea, either.

If your business is depending more and more on e-commerce or online marketing, excellent design and content are becoming increasingly important, not less so. Make sure you’re not selling yourself short.