#5-second

5-Second Rule Backed Up By Science

We’ve all done it — dropped food on the floor, scrambled to pick it up and kept eating it because of the five-second rule Well, new research says the five-second rule might actually be legit

“Researchers at Aston University in England studied how quickly food picks up bacteria when it falls on the floor They found out the less time food spends on the floor, the less germs it gets We all knew…

Watch Jim Parsons And Jimmy Fallon Play 5-Second Summaries

EW

Ever since Jimmy Fallon took the helm at The Tonight Show on NBC, many of the fun and games carried over from his stint at Late Night. Fallon often has a stable of regulars that come on the show to promote whatever project they are working on and, while it’s fun to watch the interviews, it’s even more fun to watch our favorite stars engage in the silly games that Jimmy and his writers hatch in…

Are 5-second tests a useful tool for evaluating web pages? Several online tools offer them, and they are easy to set up, but what value do they provide? My doubts boiled down to:

Who only spends 5 seconds looking at a website? In my normal browsing behavior I rarely hit the back button after only 5 seconds, unless the site is very obviously the wrong thing or it's a broken page.

The usual instruction to "remember as much as you can" makes me scan the page totally differently than when I'm actually seeking information.

What should a user be able to take away from a page after such a short time?

I've come to the conclusion that 5-second tests can have some value for certain pages when set up well.

Test the right pages

Five-second tests are best suite to judge pages where users most often land, and which generally serve a single purpose and audience.

Frame the test well

One of the few authoritative articles I found on 5-second test was written by Christine Perfetti on UIE's website. It is an in-depth explanation with a great example. One key component she mentions is to start the users off with a specific task/context (not just "remember everything you can!").

What is the typical scenario for users arriving to the page you're testing?Paid search? Following a link from a friend? An email newsletter? Provide that specific context to put the user in the right mindset.

Ask the right follow-up questions

Another element Perfetti recommends is specific follow-up questions. Don't just ask users to "list everything you remember". Also ask 1 to 2 specific follow up questions. For example, "Who is this website for?", "What can you do on this website?", "Is this site for buying or browsing?"

Develop expectations beforehand

In order to write the best follow-up questions, you have to decide what you want and expect your page's visitors to understand immediately about the page. Is it enough to pick out the right audience ("this site is for schoolteachers")? Or, do you need to communicate the product or service as well ("this site helps schoolteachers asses students' reading levels")?

Make sure to try out a few 5-second tests to see for yourself how little you may actually register of a web page in that time. Set your expectations of users accordingly.

Resources

The best site I've seen so far for 5-second tests is UsabilityHub.com. Try out some tests and set up your own. The results are presented in a word cloud along with raw answers.

Inspired by UsabilityHub, I gathered all the responses from my recent 5-second tests and fed them into wordle.net. I had to do a bit of tweaking to prep them -- grouping phrases, and combining singular and plural versions of the same words. I tested two webpages, which each sell similar products. Here are the results:

CityPass Boston

Go Boston Card

Observations

Both communicate "Boston" strongly

They each manage to communicate the product name

But, they don't necessarily convey "item for sale" right away

Viewers of both pages recalled details of the photos

The photos generally did not contribute to the initial understanding of the page

The CityPass page communicates "attractions" more strongly than the Go Boston Card page

Questions

In trying to decide whether 5-second memory tests have any merit, I've been trying out different services that provide them. Each of them has its merits.

Verify App

The nice thing about Verify is you can put do a split 5-second test, putting 2 or more variations up against each other (this requires the $99/mo Premium plan). I suppose you could also do this just by creating multiple tests, but it's nice to see the results side by side. The display of results is pretty good, grouping responses by popular words. And, you can download the data to a CSV.

UsabilityHub

The best feature of UsabilityHub's 5-second tests is the results display. A word cloud seems the perfect way to instantly see what has made an impression on users. Here again, you can download the data as a CSV. UsabilityHub also allows you more than one follow-up question, which can be useful.

Cost

Each of these services allows you to get free results just by sharing a direct link. UsabilityHub's plans range from free to $200/month, and grant you a quota of responses. Verify has 3 plans from $19 to $99/month. Unfortunately, with Verify you're only paying for features...paid responses are extra, at $1/response, which seems really steep for something like a 5-second test.

Conclusion