Psychology & Experience

In February 2015, a Tumblr user posted a washed-out photo of a dress with a simple question: is this white and gold, or blue and black? Within days, the image had divided the internet, made its way onto morning television, and become one of the most studied optical phenomena in modern vision science. I was […]

Trust is not a conclusion. It’s a feeling. And online, it forms faster than most people realize. Research puts it at around fifty milliseconds for an initial visual impression, though the trust signals that follow in the first few seconds are what determine whether that impression holds. By the time a visitor has scrolled past […]

Before you read a single word on a website, you feel something. That feeling — the one that happens in the first fraction of a second, before your conscious mind has processed anything — often comes from color. The brain responds to it almost instantaneously, faster than it processes language, faster than it evaluates layout […]