How to Make the Most of Five Seconds

You might be amazed how little time it takes for users to get a first impression of a website and how difficult it is to change that impression once it’s made. Wouldn’t it be great to know what users see in the first 5 seconds of viewing a site design – before building it out?

Thanks to Matt Milosavljevic and his friends at mayhem(method), as well as inspiration from User Interface Engineering, we can easily gather this information with the Five Second Test webapp. It’s a very handy tool that allows designers to upload a design mockup and receive a link to distribute to test subjects. These participants simply view the image for 5 seconds, then list up to 5 things they remember about the image. Designers also receive an administrator link where they can view individual results. Two other test types are available (compare & sentiment), results reporting is offered as a premium feature and tests can be made public for random participants who visit the site.

This tidy little app elegantly solves most problems associated with gathering users together and collecting their feedback. However, one critical flaw exists, not with this implementation, but with the tests themselves: Participants are given no purposeful task or goal. Sandra Niehaus explains:

What you tell the participant to do prior to the test will change their behavior…If you’re using the Five Second Test, the primary “Classic” task is to “Remember what you see.” While this can provide helpful insights into what elements are memorable, remember that it primes the participant with a specific intent, which in turn influences his or her behavior.

The simplest way to improve the existing Five Second Test would be to allow designers to customize the instructions that precede the image to be shown. That’s the path of least resistance on the part of the app’s developers. In the ideal world, I would recommend adding an entirely new type of task-oriented test. It would work as follows:

1. Designer uploads image
2. Designer specifies a custom task for the instructions
3. Designer draws an image map hot spot around the task’s goal area
4. Test is created, designer distributes to participants
5. Participants try to perform the the specified task
6. Test ends when participant clicks anywhere on the image
7. System records click locations & time elapsed before clicks occur

So what do you think? Would something like this be more useful? Do you think it would be all that difficult to program?