First impression

I have just read a blog that brought up the topic of good design and how they suggested a website home page should look. This reminded me of two thing I keep on my shelf to remind my about “good design” the fist is a Journal article by: Gitte, L. Fernandes, G. Dudek, C. Brown, J. 2006. “Attention Web Designers: You have 50 Milliseconds to make a Good First Impression!” Behaviour & Information Technology 25(2): 115-126.

And the second is a book by: Gladwell, M. 2005. Blink. Penguin Books.

I do like Malcolm Gladwell’s books in particular. One example he uses is how quickly students make judgments on how good a lecturer of teacher is going to be and how this correlates to their final opinions after months of teaching. Is their opinion formed after one week, one lesson? The answer seems to be about 30 seconds at most and their opinions do not seem to change for the entirety of the teaching. For more details on this I would highly recommend reading the book. But maybe you should definitely stop and think about what impression you are going to give someone when meeting them for the first time or showing someone your work for the first time.

Blink reminds me that people make up their mind very quickly about everything not just website not just lectures and teachers.