Method of UX-research that helps to explore users’ first impressions of design. In the process of testing a designer shows his project — commonly, one page — and then asks questions about the design.

The goal of the test is to understand what information users take away and make sure that this is what a designer wants to provide.

Why 5 Seconds

According to different research, users make decisions quickly. They need only a few seconds to decide whether they stay or leave the site. Users also usually spend no more than 15 seconds on one page. That means that your design should be quicker and deliver a message as fast as possible.

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Five second test is perfect for analyzing the first impression, but after you will also need other tests to find out how people interact with your product

How to Run

To run the test you need to adapt your design for testing, prepare questions, find participants and after then interpret the results.

Design

You can not show a raw Figma file for participants as there are a lot of disturbing details. For testing you need a screenshot of the page, high-fidelity mockup or prototype of your page. The idea here is that your design should look like a real internet page.

Make sure that it is comfortable for participants to examine the page. If possible, give them devices. This test can be easily run remotely on participants’ devices.

Questions

Questions depend also on your personal goals. For example, you have some doubts on the composition of the page and suppose that some of the elements are getting lost among details. In this case, you can ask whether a user remembers a particular element.

Here are some questions you can ask at any 5 second test.

  1. What is this page about?
  2. What is the purpose of the page?
  3. What is your impression of design?
  4. Would you like to spend more time on the page?
  5. What are elements you can recall?
  6. What is the main element you can recall?
  7. For whom this page might be interesting?
  8. What do you like best about the design?
  9. What do you like least?

Participants

You can find participants among members of your team or other divisions in your company. Random people are perfect for the test so you can find people among your friends and their friends.

Results

Analyzing test participants’ answers you can find out whether people catch or not important content of the page and it’s main purpose. You will be able to explore weak points of design and then eliminate them.

To make analysis more simple you can also give participants a rating scale for every question. While interpreting answers you can find some patterns and group them to focus on main problems of the design.

Controversial

Five second test is appropriate when you need to explore first impressions. But when you need to figure out how people interact with your product, for example whether they are ready or not to give you their contacts or buy something, you need other methods of testing.

For example, you can conduct a survey to receive a deeper feedback on content of the site or run a tree testing to evaluate its structure.