1px.com

First impressions do last

2006-01-18T10:20:52+00:00

We've known for ages, but my best argument has so far been What girls makes you rubberneck? now I can throw in some scientific proof ...

Scientists from Canada has shown that it only takes 1/20th. of a second for people to generate their first impression and -even more interesting- that people tend to stick with their first notion.

We all like to be right so we tend to debate ourselves into continuing to like a site even when we find flaws merely to prevent us from proving ourselves wrong. This means that it's steep uphill for sites that generate a bad first impression.

So what goes into generating a first impression? Well since it only takes 1/20th. of a second, content -as in messages- is not in the loop. Check this link if you don't believe me What does 50ms look like?

An interesting aspect of this is ofcourse that no page renders in 1/20th of a second so you cannot map these results directly to a real live perception of a webpage. In fact the conclusion was that there was no significant difference in whether people was exposed 50 or 500 ms - so that leaves us with no clue as to how long it actually takes to generate a first impression. My bet is that it’s individual.

What does stand is that first impressions do last so it's all about esthetics and knowing our target group.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and a bunch of scientist might find a site filled with text attractive whereas a bunch designers might want no text at all. There no certain way of knowing, so find out as much as you can about your target group - use your experience - add common sense and test test test.

The article at Nature

Happy New Year!

2006-01-01T11:08:00+00:00

What better occasion to post predictions for 2006.

The ASP wave will get even bigger and flood us with even more web-driven applications
Identity 2.0 will hopefully kick in
A company website will be a more integrated part of the company strategy and people will therefore be more focused on the value of their website

Is CMS dead?

2005-12-28T23:47:00+00:00

Having developed our own CMS over the course of 5 years I've come to know the strengths and weaknesses of the concept and lately I've seriously begun doubting whether the approach is completely off.

With our own CMS we've always tried to limit what people had access to instead of giving them the features galore approach of almost everyone else. Having been forced to act as the salesperson myself I know that it's a lot easier to sell the promise of "You can do everything yourself" so trying to educate people of the opposite hasn't been easy.

So what is it that's wrong? Well, not one house that fits everybody, so if the house is already build you will have to adopt to the house. Ofcourse you can move a wall or two but since some of them are structural they can not be moved or taken down. That's the problem.

I've realised that what we've been building and promoting is a framework. The CMS is dead - long live the framework!

Less as a competitive advantage

2005-12-10T22:12:00+00:00

As a follow up on yesterdays post this article from Fast Company elaborates on the fact that you need to focus. The following quote nails it.

“Google has the functionality of a really complicated Swiss Army knife, but the home page is our way of approaching it closed. It’s simple, it’s elegant, you can slip it in your pocket, but it’s got the great doodad when you need it. A lot of our competitors are like a Swiss Army knife open-and that can be intimidating and occasionally harmful.”

http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/100/beauty-of-simplicity.html

You need to take charge of your website

2005-12-09T22:08:00+00:00

Making decisions isn’t easy but that doesn’t mean that they don’t have to be made. Building a website means taking decisions upon decisions - who to focus on and what to focus on. Getting people to realize that it’s crucial to the success of the website that these decisions are made is always a struggle. Our alltime favorite Gerry McGovern touches upon that in his latest “NEW THINKING” newsletter. Especially the following part is spot on.

“Look at Google. What do you see on the Google homepage? A very big search box. And is this all that Google offers? Of course not.

Here’s what else Google offers: Alerts, Local, Answers, Maps, Blog Search, Mobile, Book Search, News, Catalogs, Scholar, Directory, SMS, Froogle, Special Searches, Groups, University Search, Images, Labs, Web Search Features, Blogger, Picasa, Code, Talk, Desktop, Toolbar, Earth, Translate, Gmail.

You can’t administer a website; you have to manage it. If Google administered its website, then every time it released a new tool or service, it would add it to its homepage.”

http://www.gerrymcgovern.com/nt/2005/nt-2005-11-28-nino-doll.htm

Design means business

2005-11-26T22:05:00+00:00

We’ve always argued that webdesign and business are not opposites. Not that we have had trouble convincing people but it’s always nice to see someone else taking on the argument.

http://www.alistapart.com/articles/designcancripple