Usability Tools Podcast: 5-Second Usability Tests
UIE Usability Tools Podcast: 5 Second Tests
Recorded: August 7, 2007 from the studios of UIE
Brian Christiansen, UIE Podcast Producer
Duration: 16 min | File size: 9.5 MB
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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
As always, we’re very interested in hearing from you. Do you have questions or comments about this episode? Do you have suggestions for future episodes? We want to know. Please leave a comment below or email us directly at [email protected].
UIE’s Latest Research: If you’re interested in the topics Christine and I discuss in the podcasts, I highly suggest you sign up for our free newsletter, UIEtips, to read our latest usability and design research as soon as we publish it. We’ll also notify you in UIEtips when we publish new podcasts.
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