You got only 1/20 second

I read this is in my local newspaper today, and of course it appeared in my feed subscriptions. Whitespace and ProBlogger both reported about it.

Researchers in Canada came to the conclusion that it takes only the first twentieth of a second to decide for yourself if you like a website or not (news@nature.com article). Before this research the meaning was that it takes at least a half second to make that decision. Well, this is not a huge amount of time either.

And what makes it even better is that, once you came to the impression that a website looks good, you defend this impression. I can honestly say I’ve been observing this on myself. If a website looks really nice to, it just has to be good. That means for example I read something which, if it was somewhere else on the Web, would’ve not interested me.

The first impression is very important when visitor come via Google. Sometimes I click on search results, and in the same second I pressed the back button, just because the site did not look right. Of course when you read about something and another website is mentioned that is strongly related to the topic, you don’t care as much about the design, then you will read it nonetheless (… for more than a half second).

So did you encounter some moments where you really liked a site, not knowing what it’s even about? Or do you always check the whole site first, before you decide for yourself if it is good?