Review and Musings: Attention web designers: You have 50 milliseconds to make a good first impression!/ Lindgaard et. al.

The title says it all. Welcome to the world of the superficial. Form has eclipsed function. Paris Hilton is Einstein. If it looks good it is. Some have called this research stupid. I disagree. The conclusion is false, but scholarly. The article is a peer-reviewed assessment of the staggering rate at which the human mind apprehends information and empowers judgment. It shows that web-savvy students (my presumption, but are there any other kind) agree with incredible unanimity about which web designs are good and which are bad. And they do it in 1/20 of a second or less. That human beings can make good decisions in the blink of an eye recalls to mind Malcolm Gladwell’s best selling book by that title: Blink.

Paradoxically, the authors’ experts could come to absolutely no agreement on what constitutes good or bad web design. This is an old saw by now. Everyone knows beauty when they see it but no one can define it.

Technically accurate but useless
There is a joke about a pilot who becomes lost in the fog. He can communicate with the control tower but they are unable to locate him on radar. The pilot notes he is coming upon some buildings and that there is a man on the balcony. The control tower suggests that he fly by and ask for his location. The pilot does so, shouting “Where am I?” The man on the balcony replies “You’re in an airplane!” Overhearing the conversation, the control tower says, “Relax. You seem to be in Redmond, Washington. You can land momentarily. We’ll vector you in.” After a successful landing the astonished the pilot finds the controller, thanks him, and asks, “How did you know where I was from such a brief conversation?” The controller replies, “Well, you received a technically correct but useless answer. You must have been flying by Microsoft.”

So it is in some ways with this work. It is supported with psycho-statistical methodology Despite my training[1], I am going to resist the overwhelming urge to summarize it. I will say only that the methodology and the analytics are perfectly well executed but superfluous.

Why Lindgaard et. al. got it wrong.
Gold glitters. Things that work well tend to be beautiful. Form follows function. That is why, when we make snap judgments, we are often correct. But we are not always correct. And it is a foolish person, indeed, who makes important judgments without due consideration. Movie stars are morally bankrupt. English automobiles look good but leak oil. All that glitters is not gold.

The function of a web page is not to look good but to fill a need of a community. If the community is a vendor/buyer community then the goal is to sell/buy something. In that vein, some contend that “Ugly sells!” I will admit that web pages that are well thought out are usually pretty, but the converse is not necessarily true. That is why Lindgaard etc. got it wrong. Their article showed that humans assimilate information in remarkably short time frames. This does not mean “Attention web designers: You have 50 milliseconds to make a good first impression!” This means that if you have a good looking website users will figure it out quickly. So what? If you have a functional web site users may figure that out quickly too. Unfortunately, no assessment was made of function. Can that be assessed in the blink of an eye? It would have been interesting to note if the functional sites were also the same ones the students approved in an eye bat.

Don’t get me wrong. I am all for beauty. True beauty is an attribute of God[2]. But it does not trump function. I would even go so far as to say that a site that looks pretty and is dysfunctional is not truly beautiful but only apparently so. That would, however, raise a whole different issue with which I leave the reader in the form of a question.

Is beauty objective? I welcome your comments.

REFERENCES

[1] I have many potentially boring and pedantic things to say regarding the subject of statistical methodology. I am a chemical engineer specializing in experimental design. Indeed, I have even written a book with over half its pages devoted to the subject. I have also formally studied psychological and organizational statistics. Inasmuch as this is not the main point of this blog installment, I will spare the reader this diatribe and leave him to ponder his good fortune.
[2] As noted by Anselm, Augustine, Aquinas, and Scripture.