Improving the website in 5 seconds (test)

The internet is a very competitive environment. Not only needs your website to be found in searches or referenced by links, but once the visitor lands on your site he needs to get the basic information about company, products or solutions: keywords or subject.

Zapping websites

In order to do so, a company, product or service website should explain briefly what it is all about.
People haven gotten the habit of zapping TV-shows and have adopted the same attitude on the Internet when:
- Not a clear message
- Not interesting
- Not up to the expectations created previously
- Not the appropriate subject

People take quick decisions on the Internet, this brings the requirement the need to grab the attention and bring the basic message or information within 5 seconds or less.

The importance of the website impression

Take a look at your company website.
- What is the company apparently selling?
- What exactly do read or see people when they visit your website for the first time?
- What message is retained?
- What important information is not retained?
- What message is louder than all the others?
- What is being clicked upon?

There are many items and factor that play a role:
- The images used to the headers and the menu choices.
- The Flash movies that grab additional attention (if they load fast)
- The size of titles used
- The colors and colored text used
- The positioning on the page
- The amount of text
- The length of paragraphs with text

All these visual distractions can:
- Confuse the visitor
- Bring the wrong message
- Draw the attention to 1 or 2 messages
- Miss the real message.

Website testing in 5 seconds

You can try to test yourself, but that will be costly and time consuming as you need to set up a test environment, find people and test them without influencing them.
The best place to test is in their normal habitat, not in a test environment.

As an alternative you can put up a screen shot on FiveSecondTest and have it tested by:
- Visitors that arrive random on the website.
- People you invite to take the test (click link here)

There are two type of tests you can set up:
1) The keywords remembered
2) The click map and the item or keywords clicked at
The web service will then present your screen shot during 5 seconds and then collect the first impressions of retained information using an online form.

As the FiveSecondTest website is mainly or only known by people working in the web design industry or marketing, the testers are not representative for the average man on the street or the average businessman. Thus the results are biased as these visitors are trained or even specialists.

10 Testers: sufficient

In rather a short time (less than 12 hours) you will collect 12 impressions of your website.
Just 12 data points is probably not enough for a final test, although Laurie Faulkner explains 15 users are good enough (pdf) and 10 won’t deviate from the results too much. Of course not all 12 visitors will complete the test form as some leave the form blank.
The data collected and aggregated from 10 or 12 visitors will give already a good indication of the main keywords remembered or the area’s attracting the most clicks.
Good enough to get you rethinking your website.

The results

Our results and conclusions based upon several tests:
- People do remember the main functionality: Leads
- The orange “Free 30-Day Trial” button was too overwhelming: we have moved it.
- The brand name LEADSExplorer was well remembered.
- Too much text – probably too many titles asking for attention.
- People hardly click on the screen shots except for the world map
- Screen shots were too big.

Conclusion: A redesign is clearly needed

The real messaging and usability website testing is of a different kind and will take more time and will cost money.
The main benefit of FiveSecondTest is that you can run this test several times for free over a short time span, getting results that are significant enough to solve the main problems of your website before going into a next phase of using a paying solution over a longer time span.

In order to have a first test of your website about the subject or keywords retained and messaging communication this is probably the best available solution that is even free.

How about your website ?
What do people remember ?