Consumer WebWatch has published the results of a large study analysing how people evaluate a website's credibility. The 'Design look' of a site was rated as the most important feature in the evaluation criteria of web users:
One of the overall findings from this study is that our participants relied heavily on the surface qualities of a Web site to make credibility judgments. Our result about the prominence of Design Look was not what we had hoped to find; we had hoped to see that people used more rigorous evaluation strategies.
In some ways the results are not at all surprising. If you think about how you use the web yourself you would have to note that you spend little time assessing new sites. You may have a core of sites that you visit regularly and you don't notice their design anymore. You just look for updated content. On the other hand, when visiting a site for the first time what do you notice? Call me superficial but having read this study I acknowledge that in a split second I will make a judgement about the site. This judgement is more complex than "Oh, they couldn't afford a proper graphic designer", it is made up of half-formed assumptions to do with credibility, the information organisation of the site, the politics of the organisation running the site (including the place of web content and even technology in the organisation) and the ability of the organisation to perform offline tasks. I will usually persevere with a site to assess it's content however, unless it is very badly designed and has tell-tale signs such as "last updated Sept 1998" on the front page. A favourable initial impression prompted by good design encourages me to persevere for longer than I may have otherwise. I want to stress that this is a decision made in an extremely short space of time. We're talking nanoseconds here.
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