These days a lot of effort is spent optimising websites for search engine friendliness – and for good reason. A high search engine ranking for correctly targeted keywords is one of the most effective ways of generating qualified traffic to your website.
But marketers ought to carefully consider what happens once the user gets to your website – and how to make the best first impression possible. The first impression a website gives users is undervalued by B2B marketers and is something they should take more seriously.
In the B2B sector the bounce rates of many websites run at well over 50 per cent, which is ludicrous. The back button is often hit within seconds. This is basically someone getting to your site and the first thing they think is something like ‘Oh my goodness, get me out of here’. It’s even crazier if you’ve just paid £1.50 or so for this precious click-through. If the first impression is not good, they will leave.
So, why do we allow this to happen? All in all, I just don’t think it’s really considered. Do we really think, ‘What is the very first impression a new visitor will get about our business from our website’s design?’ There’s a tendency to evaluate site design too much on our own preferences, where creative is often judged with all the professionalism as if we are picking a wallpaper for our sitting room. Or even worse, design decisions are made by committee – everyone has a say and feeds back.
So, how do people form first impressions when visiting a website, and why are they so important? There are a lot of variations on theme of how long it takes someone to make up their mind about a website, but researchers from Carleton University of Ontario have found that ‘users make up their minds in a blink of an eye – that’s 1/20th of a second’. My first reaction at reading this was that it was ridiculous – surely it takes at least a few seconds for me to think ‘yes this looks about right’ or ‘nope, I’m out of here’? What they found, though, is that opinions start to be formed on both an emotional and cognitive level as soon as the eye begins to take in information.
(As an aside, one simple thing to nail is to make sure your site is fast-loading, the longer it takes for the site to appear in the browser means your chances of creating a good first impression are ebbing away before your user has even seen anything).
The research goes on to say, just like when meeting someone in real life where first impressions can last a lifetime, the first impression can set the tone for the rest of our experience on a website and relationship with that business.
By creating the right first impression you can vastly increase the likelihood of a purchase decision being made.
There are a few factors at work here. One is what author Malcolm Gladwell refers to in Blink as ‘thin slicing’ – the ability for our unconscious to make instant, instinctual judgments based upon the cumulative knowledge built up with previous experiences. We’ve all used a lot of websites and experienced a lot of brands, and we build up enough knowledge of when something works well – or doesn’t – to be able to make these instant judgments.
Basically, the better something looks to us in our first impression, the more we will perceive that it works better and is more desirable – even if it is not. This means it’s better to create a good design that creates a great first impression, then to build the user experience on this afterwards using usability technique. A quote I am fond of is: ‘Focusing on usability will help you get the design right, but it won’t help you get the right design.’
There’s an irony that a lot of the usability sites – such as useit.com – which (I presume) have been designed completely around usability principles, look like they’ve been designed by Stevie Wonder. The first impression in this case is that ‘this looks rubbish’, even if it’s quite easy to use. Our subsequent impressions are coloured by that first impression.
‘People perceive things as a unified whole in relationship with their surroundings rather than a set of individual features’, according to this theory. Here’s where the designer’s skill comes in. To create a great site design they need to combine graphic design, information, signposting, interface design, messaging and an element of surprise and ‘wow’, with the highest possible signal-to-noise ratio.
The combined effect is a positive first impression that can have a big impact on your users’ opinion of your brand and your whole possible future relationship.
So please can I have no more ‘why is there all this white space here? Let’s add another feature in there instead to use it up’.
