Users love simple and familiar designs – Why websites need to make a great first impression

Posted by Javier Bargas-Avila, Senior User Experience Researcher at YouTube UX Research

I’m sure you’ve experienced this at some point: You click on a link to a website, and after a quick glance you already know you’re not interested, so you click ‘back’ and head elsewhere. How did you make that snap judgment? Did you really read and process enough information to know that this website wasn’t what you were looking for? Or was it something more immediate?

We form first impressions of the people and things we encounter in our daily lives in an extraordinarily short timeframe. We know the first impression a website’s design creates is crucial in capturing users’ interest. In less than 50 milliseconds, users build an initial “gut feeling” that helps them decide whether they’ll stay or leave. This first impression depends on many factors: structure, colors, spacing, symmetry, amount of text, fonts, and more.

In our study we investigated how users' first impressions of websites are influenced by two design factors:

1. Visual complexity -- how complex the visual design of a website looks 
2. Prototypicality -- how representative a design looks for a certain category of websites

We presented screenshots of existing websites that varied in both of these factors -- visual complexity and prototypicality -- and asked users to rate their beauty.

The results show that both visual complexity and prototypicality play crucial roles in the process of forming an aesthetic judgment. It happens within incredibly short timeframes between 17 and 50 milliseconds. By comparison, the average blink of an eye takes 100 to 400 milliseconds.

And these two factors are interrelated: if the visual complexity of a website is high, users perceive it as less beautiful, even if the design is familiar. And if the design is unfamiliar -- i.e., the site has low prototypicality -- users judge it as uglier, even if it’s simple.

In other words, users strongly prefer website designs that look both simple (low complexity) and familiar (high prototypicality). That means if you’re designing a website, you’ll want to consider both factors. Designs that contradict what users typically expect of a website may hurt users’ first impression and damage their expectations. Recent research shows that negative product expectations lead to lower satisfaction in product interaction -- a downward spiral you’ll want to avoid. Go for simple and familiar if you want to appeal to your users’ sense of beauty.

Reflections on Digital Interactions: Thoughts from the 2012 NA Faculty Summit

Posted by Alfred Spector, Vice President of Research and Special Initiatives

Last week, we held our eighth annual North America Computer Science Faculty Summit at our headquarters in Mountain View. Over 100 leading faculty joined us from 65 universities located in North America, Asia Pacific and Latin America to attend the two-day Summit, which focused on new interactions in our increasingly digital world.

In my introductory remarks, I shared some themes that are shaping our research agenda. The first relates to the amazing scale of systems we now can contemplate. How can we get to computational clouds of, perhaps, a billion cores (or processing elements)? How can such clouds be efficient and manageable, and what will they be capable of? Google is actively working on most aspects of large scale systems, and we continue to look for opportunities to collaborate with our academic colleagues. I note that we announced a cloud-based program to support Education based on Google App Engine technology.

Another theme in my introduction was semantic understanding. With the introduction of our Knowledge Graph and other work, we are making great progress toward data-driven analysis of the meaning of information. Users, who provide a continual stream of subtle feedback, drive continuous improvement in the quality of our systems, whether about a celebrity, the meaning of a word in context, or a historical event. In addition, we have found that the combination of information from multiple sources helps us understand meaning more efficiently. When multiple signals are aggregated, particularly with different types of analysis, we have fewer errors and improved semantic understanding. Applying the “combination hypothesis,” makes systems more intelligent.

Finally, I talked about User Experience. Our field is developing ever more creative user interfaces (which both present information to users, and accept information from them), partially due to the revolution in mobile computing but also due in-part to the availability of large-scale processing in the cloud and deeper semantic understanding. There is no doubt that our interactions with computers will be vastly different 10 years from now, and they will be significantly more fluid, or natural.

This page lists the Googler and Faculty presentations at the summit.

One of the highest intensity sessions we had was the panel on online learning with Daphne Koller from Stanford/Coursera, and Peter Norvig and Bradley Horowitz from Google. While there is a long way to go, I am so pleased that academicians are now thinking seriously about how information technology can be used to make education more effective and efficient. The infrastructure and user-device building blocks are there, and I think the community can now quickly get creative and provide the experiences we want for our students. Certainly, our own recent experience with our online Power Searching Course shows that the baseline approach works, but it also illustrates how much more can be done.

I asked Elliot Solloway (University of Michigan) and Cathleen Norris (University of North Texas), two faculty attendees, to provide their perspective on the panel and they have posted their reflections on their blog.

The digital era is changing the human experience. The summit talks and sessions exemplified the new ways in which we interact with devices, each other, and the world around us, and revealed the vast potential for further innovation in this space. Events such as these keep ideas flowing and it’s immensely fun to be part of very broadly-based, computer science community.

Is beautiful usable? What is the influence of beauty and usability on reactions to a product?

Posted by Javier Bargas-Avila, Senior User Experience Researcher at YouTube UX Research

Did you ever come across a product that looked beautiful but was awful to use? Or stumbled over something that was not nice to look at but did exactly what you wanted?

Product usability and aesthetics are coexistent, but they are not identical. To understand how usability and aesthetics influence reactions to a product, we conducted an experimental lab study with 80 participants. We created four versions of an online clothing shop varying in beauty (high vs. low) and usability (high vs. low). Participants had to find a number of items in one of those shops and buy them. To understand how the factors of beauty and usability influence final users happiness, we measured how they much they liked the shop before and after interaction.

The results showed that the beauty of the interface did not affect how users perceived the usability of the shops: Participants (or Users) were capable of distinguishing if a product was usable or not, no matter how nice it looked. However, the experiment showed that the usability of the shops influenced how users rated the products' beauty. Participants using shops with bad usability rated the shops as less beautiful after using the shops. We showed that poor usability lead to frustration, which put the users in a bad mood and made them rate the product as less beautiful than before interacting with the shop.

Successful products should be beautiful and usable. Our data provide insight into how these factors work together.