Each week in our Usability Tools Podcast, I will be sitting down with UIE’s Managing Director, Christine Perfetti to discuss tips and tools for improving your site’s user experience. The goal of our weekly podcast is to share some of the most important findings from UIE’s research on web design and usability.
This week, Christine Perfetti asked me about one of UIE’s most popular usability testing techniques, 5-Second Tests. A couple of years ago, Christine Perfetti wrote an excellent introductory article about 5-Second Tests, and we’ve been getting questions about the technique ever since.
The 5-Second Test Method shows users a single content page for a quick 5 seconds to gather their initial impressions. Five seconds may not seem like a lot of time, but users make important judgments in the first moments they visit a page. In this podcast, Christine and I discuss:
» Why 5-Second Tests should be used primarily to test a site’s content pages » Why 5-Second Tests aren’t effective on most Home Pages » How to conduct this test with your users » What some of the common mistakes design teams make when conducting a 5-Second Test » How to recruit users with this technique » How to combine 5-Second Techniques with other types of tasks