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How To DIY Site Design And Usability
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One of the trendiest topics online at the moment seems to be usability and how websites are built and navigated around by common folk like me and you. It used to be that you would build a website with some simple tabs, a header and footer and apart from people putting their different personal slant on it that was how things worked. With design moving on and the tools available to developers and designers becoming more advanced we have all started to look at the web a little differently and now expect to have our expectations challenged with what we see online.
Most readers of this blog will use a content management system or have their blogs or websites running on something like wordpress so we thought we would share a great little tool called 5 second test that will help you get a little feedback on what your users are looking at and possibly improve your design yourself. This will be particularly useful if you have a call to action like “contact us” or an email newsletter or RSS that you want people visiting your site to sign up to. Try the test out by sending it our to a few people in Twitter or Facebook. It may not be an exact science but if you get enough people to take the test you will see a pattern emerging and be able to make some small changes and become your own usability expert!
Here is the example of the test we ran on the Simply Zesty site that shows where people clicked when given 5 seconds on our site
Here is the test that we got 50 people to take for this site. People were asked to highlight the first 3 places their attention was drawn to using a red dot. It builds a good picture up of what people look at on our site and allows us to make changes accordingly.
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It’s really useful, Amazing to quickly see how ineffectual your homepage is!! as visitors were clicking on logo and home link (both going to same destination)
As well as people clicking on non interactive elements (text & rotate image)
Yep defo agreed Barry! That is why we did it! The key now is getting some of our targets into that top fold and playing around with it! Contact us would be the most obvious for us to get customers calling and emailing!
Could be useful to implement some heatmaps if you don’t already have something, CrazyEgg is good, Clickheat is free – http://www.labsmedia.com/clickheat/
Collect enough data, drop in Google’s Website Optimizer and run some multivariate split testing. Cool thing is you can do most of this with free tools.
Do you have any examples of changes you actually made on the back of using a Five Second Test? I’d be interested to see if the results of your changes matched your expectations.
My suspicion is that the test can be overwhelmed by simple things like an eye catching picture or logo, both of which you’d expect the eye to be drawn to briefly. That leaves very little time for any actual usability information to be registered.
Like most good ideas, Five Second Test is pretty simple. Unfortunately, I think it might be too simple.
We’ll let you know of changes we make to the site, as a result of the test. I think the beauty is in its simplicity. The fact it takes virtually no time for a user to participate is a big plus for me.
I recommend a nice big bright call-to-action button as part of the opening blurb left of the picture. Have it say Contact Us or whatever you want your site conversions to be.
That’s a really good idea. Wouldn’t want it to look too ‘garish’ , but be fairly prominent on the homepage.
5 Second Tests are ultimately flawed. What’s the average bounce rate on your homepage? It’s not 5 seconds so why give a group of random people 5 seconds to click something, anything at all.
Heat maps and density maps are much more valuable than almost pressuring people into making a click and using that as a measurement of usability.
There are much better tools out there for usability testing that 5SecondTest. I wouldn’t even count it as a usability tool myself.
Ah yeah I would say there are a load of better tests out there for professional designers but I do think this is useful for amateurs to get a quick look at what people think about their site. We know from quickly looking at ours here that we have some very obvious flaws that we need to get ironed out ASAP such as a way for people to contact us. agree you would need something far more advanced to do it properly though