Research
You have
50 milliseconds.
What Carleton, Basel and Microsoft found about first impressions and speed.
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What the research found
What the research found
-
Carleton University · 2006
50 ms
to judge how a website looks
People rated a homepage's visual appeal after seeing it for 50 milliseconds, and those snap ratings matched the ratings they gave after a longer look.
By Gitte Lindgaard, Gary Fernandes and colleagues
Read the study (opens in a new tab) -
University of Basel and Google · 2012
17 ms
enough to prefer simple, familiar layouts
Across 119 real websites, simple layouts that looked typical for their kind made the best first impressions, with the effect showing within 17 milliseconds.
By Alexandre N. Tuch, Klaus Opwis and colleagues
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Microsoft and LinkedIn · 2014
0.6%
more revenue for every tenth of a second faster
In a controlled experiment on Bing, every tenth of a second of extra speed was worth about 0.6 percent in revenue. This is industry research, run at very large scale.
By Ron Kohavi, Alex Deng and colleagues
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What it means for you
- 1
Make the first screen say what you do, clearly and calmly.
- 2
Keep layouts simple and familiar; save surprises for the details.
- 3
Treat speed as revenue: every tenth of a second counts.
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