You may have seen a new study by several Canadian academics in the news yesterday that found that people make decisions on the visual appeal of a website in less than a blink of an eye. As Wired reports, "in just a brief one-twentieth of a second ... people make aesthetic judgments that influence the rest of their experience with an internet site." I couldn't find the full study online but Dr. Gitte Lindgaard, one of the lead authors of the study, was kind enough to quickly forward me a copy.

Here's the nitty-gritty on how the study worked according the paper (full title of which is the subtle "Attention Web Designers: You have 50 milliseconds to Make a Good Impression!"). The Carleton University study authors solicited examples of websites that "looked really good or looked really bad." University students were asked to evaluate the visual appeal of screen shots of the sites in three rounds of tests. In the first, the students had 500 milliseconds to rate the sites on a sliding scale from "Very Unattractive" to "Very Attractive." In the next round, a new batch of students, working untimed, evaluated the sites according to a series of design characteristics. In the last round, the students scored the visual appeal of the sites on a scale from 1 to 9, but this time were given only 50 milliseconds to do it.

(Having myself dabbled as a website designer in the past, I found this part funny -- the researchers also asked eight professional designers to evaluate the attractiveness of the websites, but found that they disagreed so vehemently as for their input to be of no use.)

The study's findings? In each round of tests, the students judged the same sites ugly and the same sites pretty, at roughly the same levels of ugliness and prettiness each time. So, in short, web users judge almost immediately whether they find a website visually attractive or not. And thus, we get headlines like this one from the Wired article: "The Importance of Being Pretty."

And that's all well and good. But the question I have is whether this emphasis on pretty is a good thing for political websites -- those of candidates, PACs, non-profits, and the like -- in particular. I'll admit, way back in the early days of the Web, I was a bit of a design snob. In my world, online fontography was of such importance that I kept a large binder of printed font sheets on the shelf about my desk; I'd do a home page entirely in Flash for no other reason than because it gave me a thrill to see things jump around on the page. But I've grown up a bit since then. I think that we all have. And I think that much of that is because of political blogs – I've learned to look beyond the pretty and to focus on content. I've actually come to like a little ugly.

Most important to me is that a site's look reflect its spirit and that of its owners. For example, Duncan Black/Atrios' rough-hewn site looks like a site should look that runs a regular feature called "Wanker of the Day." In my experience, Markos Moulitsas is a take-no-prisioners kind of guy. The guy-waving-a-flag logo and orange theme of Daily Kos reflects that. Matthew Yglesias is a bit, well, weird (in a good way), and his garishly-purple personal site says weird to me. Not perhaps big winners in terms of "visual appeal" but, I think, all successful political websites. (Part of that might have to do with the fact that usability isn't a big deal for blogs anymore. There's a pretty simple and standard blog format -- homepage, archives, comments, and the like -- that is familiar from one site to the next.)

Sometimes, I think, an ugly website can be a good thing. It makes the site authentic and human, relying on good personality more than a pretty haircut. That's part of the problem when it comes to political sites for candidates and PACs and organizations. Being authentic can, I think, be incredibly scary for people who have political power -- probably a justified fear, considering how people who are identifiably human are treated in politics. A well-designed and "visually appealing" website is something that a vendor can be hired to build. But an ugly and authentic site takes real work.