CMS EDU - Chicago and Beyond

I wanted to recommend that anyone working on a Web site take a moment to download and possibly print out page 23 of the PDF document available from the link below, and consider how it might impact your strategy for designing a Web site.

It's a study I was introduced to in graduate school a few years ago, which asked 2500 people to report on what affected their perceptions of the credibility of a Web site, and there are some interesting insights.

An excerpt from the Consumer Webwatch site:

"The data showed that the average consumer paid far more attention to the superficial aspects of a site, such as visual cues, than to its content. For example, nearly half of all consumers (or 46.1%) in the study assessed the credibility of sites based in part on the appeal of the overall visual design of a site, including layout, typography, font size and color schemes."

RESOURCES:

One of the participants, Consumer Webwatch, has a page where it can be downloaded:

http://www.consumerwebwatch.org/dynamic/web-credibility-reports-evaluate-abstract.cfm

The Stanford "official" site: http://credibility.stanford.edu/publications.html