five-second-test

Five Second Test

by   |  April 5th, 2010
Design


 

 
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The Five Second Test is a simple trick to see if people are picking out the important things on your website. I’ve used this low-tech approach to get useful feedback on how effective pages are.


It goes like this: give someone five seconds to look at a page, then ask them what they remember about it.  If they aren’t remembering the things you want, perhaps it would be helpful to change some of the visuals to make important items stand out. Sometimes less is more and reducing clutter can help too.


The other day I discovered a more high tech approach at FiveSecondTest.  There you can upload a design and share with friends and colleagues to have them do your test. You can also let random users take your test as well.


Whether you use the low tech or high tech approach, the five second test can be a useful tool in your bag of tricks for creating an effective website.  What are some other approaches  you use to measure the effectiveness of individual pages on your site?

North Krimsly

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Reader comments (4)

 

Nice! I like the five second test, you really have to focus on testing one item or maybe maybe maybe two… I did a blog post on my (new!) blog on this. It’s good to know other MAC-er (madcollective members) like this as well. You can see my brief post at http://enhanceux.com/2010/5-second-ux-feedback/ check it out if you like :)


Ron Sparks | April 07, 2010

I love five second test! Thanks for introducing me to it… only tested a few sites so far, but I definitely see potential for using this for client-work.


Jeff Jimerson | April 10, 2010

yeah I like how it feels like a game… it’s kind of addicting!


Ron Sparks | April 13, 2010

Another awesome usability tool we use is Silverback: http://silverbackapp.com/
Very useful for recording initial reactions and tracking mouse movement.


Truen | April 14, 2010
 


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