Five-Second Test: Are your designs immediately captivating your target audience?
Do not underestimate the power and importance of first impressions.
How often do you allow the first impressions you have formed of someone to influence the way you interpret their actions or intentions? Likewise, how many times have you decided that it is totally not worth the time and effort to browse through a particular website, after a quick glance?
In this digital world, attention spans are getting shorter, and the time window for your work to immediately capture one’s attention has been largely reduced. Upon landing on a page, it is only a matter of seconds (or even milliseconds) before visitors decide whether to stay and browse, or head for the exit door.
“Users often leave Web pages in 10–20 seconds, but pages with a clear value proposition can hold people's attention for much longer.
To gain several minutes of user attention, you must clearly communicate your value proposition within 10 seconds.”
Hence, it is important to understand your target audience’s first impression of your designs, so that you can discover which design styles they prefer, or the type of messages that would be more effective and memorable. The ultimate goal is to reduce bounce rates and improve engagement amongst your target audience, upon first contact.
One quick and efficient method you can utilise is the Five-Second Test.
What is a Five-Second Test?
A Five-Second Test is a user research method, that helps to gauge participants’ first impressions of a design and the intended message.
This is how a Five-Second Test usually works:
- An image or screenshot (a landing page, an ad, a design or a wireframe etc.) is shown to a participant, for five seconds.
- Participant will answer follow-up questions based on their first impression and memory.
A Five-Second Test can be easily done remotely by creating them on user testing platforms/tools, and you can recruit participants from your own audience or through a user research panel.
Participants who have taken a Five-Second Test might reveal which parts of the design stood out for them, what they liked or disliked about the design, or what they remember about the message communicated to them. The data that you will be collecting from a Five-Second Test depends on the specific objectives you have set, as well as the type of follow-up questions asked to participants.
During analysis, categorise the responses into relevant themes, and identify pain points or design/copy that require improvement.
Considerations
- Five-Second Tests are simplistic, and are not appropriate for testing out user flows that require extensive interactions. Quickly test out the first impressions of your newly-designed landing page by using a screenshot or an image in a Five-Second Test. Complex, clickable prototypes meant to assess user behaviour belong elsewhere.
- In order to collect effective responses, do not let participants know about the follow-up questions before the five seconds are up. Reactions and responses of participants would be more genuine and unbiased this way.
- It may be called a Five-Second Test, but the five second duration is not set in stone. Depending on what the objective of the research is and the complexity of the information in your design, adjustments can be made to the duration.
“A fixed five-second exposure time might be enough in many cases of first impression evaluation, but adjusting the time for specific conditions and context can yield different and potentially more accurate results.
The accuracy, complexity and informativeness of provided answers increases with longer exposure time, so factors such as high complexity of stimuli or lower cognitive abilities can be balanced by prolonging the exposure time.”
Follow-up questions
The follow-up questions you ask should reflect the objectives that have been set for conducting the Five-Second Test.
Here are some examples (this list is not exhaustive):
- What do you remember about the image?
- What was your impression of the design?
- What is the main thing you can recall about the image?
- Do you recall any specific text or content from the image?
- What words or elements did you notice?
- What do you think was the purpose of that page?
- How did the design of the website make you feel?
- Were there any company names or logos present?
- Who do you think the intended audience is?
- Do you recall if they were any promotions or deals available?
That is all I have to share about Five-Second Tests! Let me know what you think; would love to hear about your past research projects or experiences :)
