Does Your Website Pass the 5 Second Test

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5 seconds isn’t that long of a time span. But it’s enough to cause your website visitors to question whether or not your website has what they want, answer if they should continue to explore your site, and give initial impressions of trustworthiness.

All that in 5 seconds? Absolutely.

Think about how you normally browse a site. Think about those initial moments after arriving at a site. Those initial feelings you have on whether or not you should continue are the same feelings your website visitors are having about your website.

What It Does

The 5 Second Test specifically focuses on the first few moments of a visitor’s interaction with a website or a web page. It is during theses initial moments that a visitor will decide:

• Do I feel I can trust this site?
• Is this where I thought I’d be?
• Do I have confidence this site will help me complete my task?
• Do I want to continue and explore further?

In 5 seconds you don’t get a whole lot but what you do get is a good idea if the page being tested is able to convey the message to your visitor. If the message isn’t conveyed correctly the visitor is gone.

Benefits of the 5 Second Test

• Fast. Within a 30 minute period you will have a good set of data.
• Capture true initial impressions. Showing the page for only 5 seconds eliminates the over-critical recommendations that
• Able to be done in the early stages of design. These test can be done using nothing more than a print out of the design.

How it Works

A 5 second test is about the easiest usability test to conduct. The name itself is almost enough direction. But for the sake of clarity lets walk through the steps involved.

1. Find a group of participants that you will show the page (or pages) to.
2. Individually, show the page to the participant for, you guessed it, 5 seconds
3. Remove the page and ask them what they page is about

Conducting a 5 Second Test

This test is so simple anyone can conduct this test. However, a word of caution. The 5 second test will be provide the most insight when conducted by someone experienced with conducting traditional usability tests. This is due to the nature of testing and getting meaningful data back. Running a clean test will provide cleaner data that is true participant feedback that isn’t influenced by the test giver.

Test that are not properly designed or not properly facilitated have the potential to produce results that are misleading causing design decisions to be made incorrectly.

Conclusion

If you have a homepage, landing page or content pages within your website that you think may be overwhelming, cluttered or just not clear in their intent a 5 second test may be in order.

If you would like help setting up or conducting a 5 second test drop us a line.

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