The five-seconds testing method is a very effective way to understand how much information your website visitors can get in a short period. There is a lot of researches prove that users leave most websites in 3-5 seconds nowadays. To grab attention the content must be very clear, understandable and rememberable for the end-user.

Using the five-seconds testing method we can ask the target audience to explain what information do they get in a short period of time and what should be cleared out.

How to run the five-seconds testing method with Sharewell?

Create a new draft test and launch a test plan builder. In a list of tasks, types find the “Five seconds” task and click it to add to the test plan steps list.

There is 3 main question you need to answer to run the successful five-seconds test:
1. What content you would like to test?
2. For how long users must see it to have a possibility to understand it?
3. What questions you should ask to get a whole picture?

Let’s look at the Sharewell website header example. We have an image on the right that shows an example of user interface and the product description text on the left. The 5 seconds period is enough to fast read content from the left column, but how clear will it be for the end-user? We can ask the tester some details and explanations about the content and figure it out.

The follow-up questions are a good tool to get inside the tester head without asking straight questions. Sharewell will aggregate the results, so you can easily understand if the content is clear for the majority.

The test results page shows aggregated feedback in percentage, so as a list of answers and behavior per test participant. Using 30-80 participants for the test could be enough the get a clear picture. if the content is much more complex extend display duration to 10-15 seconds and recruit at least 80-100 participants to have good results spread.