Instant First Impressions

I lost track of how I found this article a few days ago. The gist is that people form first impressions of a web site within a fraction of a second. In some ways, this is last year's news. Malcolm Gladwell's book, Blink, was right up this alley.

This passage in the article, specifically related to web site design, is particularly interesting: 

The lasting effect of first impressions is known to psychologists as the 'halo effect': if you can snare people with an attractive design, they are more likely to overlook other minor faults with the site, and may rate its actual content (such as this article, for example) more favourably.

This is because of 'cognitive bias', Lindgaard explains. People enjoy being right, so continuing to use a website that gave a good first impression helps to 'prove' to themselves that they made a good initial decision. The phenomenon pervades our society; even doctors have been shown to follow their initial hunches, Lindgaard says, relying heavily on a patient's most immediately obvious symptom when making a diagnosis. "It's awfully scary stuff, but the tendency to jump to conclusions is far more widespread than we realize," she says.