Why typos hurt credibility

Since Stanford University’s Persuasive Technology Lab conducted its research on web credibility over six years ago, countless writers have referred to its pioneering, and still mostly relevant, insight into how users judge organizations based on their websites.

The research assumed that credibility comes from a combination of trustworthiness and expertise. That is, users perceive an organization to be credible if its website demonstrates sincere intentions and sound knowledge.

The lab’s 10 “Guidelines for Web Credibility” are especially heavily cited by online commentators. At the bottom of the list sits the warning to “avoid errors of all types, no matter how small they seem,” followed simply by “typographical errors and broken links hurt a site’s credibility more than most people imagine.”

But what is it about spelling and other grammatical mistakes that hurts an organization’s credibility? Why do such seemingly trivial mistakes figure so largely in a visitor’s judgment of an organization, enough to make it on to the lab’s top 10 list?

The reason, as we alluded to in an earlier post, is that visitors make a cognitive association between a simple typo and an organization’s overall reliability. The visitor thinks, “If they were careless enough to let this one slip by, what else have they missed that I haven’t noticed yet?” The visitor does what everyone does: make assumptions about meaningful things based on the evidence at hand.

Of course, typos aren’t always damaging. Readers have to catch them first to hold them against you. Sophisticated readers are more likely than others to pick up subtle mistakes, and are thus more likely to hold them against you.

Credibility also depends on the purpose of your audience’s visit. Visitors casually surfing the web will usually dismiss minor spelling and other grammatical mistakes. Whereas visitors looking to make a transaction, learn something, or perform some other task that depends on an organization’s trustworthiness and expertise will ascribe more importance to them.

Of course, no person or organization is perfect. We should all be allowed the odd error, whether grammatical or not. But the findings of the Stanford study indicate that if there are typos on your website, you shouldn’t leave them there.