The “Five Second” Test – Understanding Initial Impressions

The “five second test” (it’s actually eight seconds) is a quick and effective way to gauge users’ initial impressions of your website and determine if it effectively communicates its key messages and purpose within that crucial timeframe.

Conduct a Five Second Test

To run a five second test, you can use an app called Lyssna. Here’s how:

1. Log into Lyssna and go into your project.
2. Create a new study and give it a title (e.g., “Eight Second Test”).
3. Select the device (desktop only in this case) and choose the five second test.
4. Set the test duration to eight seconds and add custom instructions.
5. Drag and drop your screenshot into the test.
6. Ask two questions:
   • “In your own words, describe what the web page is about”
   • “Please list as many screen elements as you can remember seeing on this page.”
   • Make both questions required.
7. Customize the thank you screen and welcome message if desired.
8. Save and continue.
9. Choose to either have Lyssna recruit participants or get a shareable link to share with your audience.
10. Copy the link and test the user experience.

Analyzing the Results

Once people have completed the test, log back into Lyssna, find your test, and look at the results. The results are displayed in two ways:

1. A long list of everyone’s answers, which can be downloaded as a CSV.
2. A useful word cloud showing the different words and their associated weighting, giving you an idea of:
   • What the page is about
   • Whether people have understood it
   • What they associate with the page

The Value of the Five Second Test

The five second test, or in this case, the eight second test, is a quick and effective way to gauge users’ initial impressions of your website. By presenting users with a screenshot of your site for a brief period and then asking them to describe what they remember, you can gain valuable insights into whether your site effectively communicates its key messages and purpose. This test helps you understand if your website is making the desired impact on users within the critical first few seconds of their visit. By analyzing the results and making informed design decisions based on the feedback, you can improve your site’s ability to engage and retain visitors, ultimately leading to better user experiences and increased conversions.

Eight Second Test Video Transcript

Did you know that on average a user will only spend about eight seconds assessing a page before they decide whether it’s relevant to them?

So it’s extremely important that your website communicates its key messages at a glance.

And one of the ways that you can check whether that’s the case is to run what is called a five second test.

Now why it’s called a five second test rather than an eight second test I don’t know but it just is.

So how do you run a five second test?

Well you can do this in an app called Lyssna.

So what we’re going to do is we’re going to go to Lyssna.

We’re going to log into that application and go into our project and create a new study.

We’re going to put in a title for this study which I’m going to call an eight second test.

And we’re going to test on desktop only in this particular case.

And we’re going to select our five second test.

Then we’re going to decide that we want it to test for eight seconds rather than five because that’s the average time somebody spends.

And we’re going to put in some custom instructions.

Then next we’re going to drag our screenshot and drop it in here.

And then we’re going to ask two questions.

And our first question is going to be in your own words describe what the web page is about.

Okay.

We’re going to make it a required question.

And then we’re going to add a second one which is going to be please list as many screen elements as you can remember seeing on this page.

We’re going to make that required too.

And we’re going to give people a little bit more space to answer that question.

And we could add as many questions as we want or sections or all the rest of it, customize the thank you screen, customize the welcome message.

But we won’t do that for now.

Once you’re done, you can hit save and continue.

And then you’re given two options.

You can either get Lyssna to recruit participants for you for I think a dollar or less per participant.

Or alternatively if you’ve got access to your audience, you can just get a link that you can then share.

So we’re going to do that second option.

And there are various settings that you can select.

We’re going to just enable our link.

We can then copy our link.

And we can then go across to that link to see what the user experience is like.

So this is the welcome message that you can customize.

We can hit start.

After you have viewed this page for eight seconds, we will ask you some questions.

So we can then view the page for eight seconds.

And then once that’s done, it should immediately disappear.

And we should be given our follow-up questions.

In your own words, describe what the web page is about.

Development courses for developers.

That will do.

All right.

And then hit continue.

Please list as many screen elements as you can remember.

So screen elements I saw was the navigation, the join now button, and what else did I see?

Let’s go for the video background.

Okay.

And hit continue.

So that’s now done.

Now from your perspective, once a load of people have completed that, you will just log back in to Lyssna.

Go into your project, find your test, and then you can look at the results.

Now, the results are displayed in a couple of different ways.

First of all, you will just get a long list of everybody’s answers.

You can see my answer here.

But that can be a bit overwhelming if you’ve got a lot of people answering it.

You can always download it as a CSV, and you can even use that CSV to put into ChatGPT to get it to analyze it.

But it also has a useful word cloud where you can see the different words.

And obviously, there’s not many because there’s only one answer.

But you’ll get loads of different words and their associated weighting, which will give you an idea of what the page is about, whether people have understood it, and what they associate with the page. page.

So that’s an 8 second test.