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Five-second test template

Design

Concept Validation

First impressions count—all it takes is five seconds to discover how memorable your work is for users. With this five-second test template, you can test your product, design, copy, and more to help validate important decisions—and ensure you leave a lasting impression for all the right reasons.

What you’ll learn:

How easily can users recall your designs? Can they understand your product or service?

Compare different images, wireframes, copy, and more to find out what stands out about your product at first glance.

Gather quantitative and qualitative data from your target audience to help optimize your future designs.

Make your page one users want to land on—and stay on.

Turn first impressions into lasting learnings

Impressions are given quickly, but key learnings develop over time. Make your research go further with follow-up questions, and turn findings into detailed Maze Reports for the whole team.

How to use

Select this 5-second test template from the gallery.

Modify blocks and copy to your preference.

Do a pilot test with somebody in your organization (preferably, not on your team).

All good? Then it’s time to set it live and wait for the feedback to roll in!

When to use this template?

Five-second tests are designed to extract first impressions of your product from users so should be used for gathering quick overall thoughts of high-fidelity designs.

Five-second tests are not well suited to text-heavy pages or designs expressing complex themes.

Tips to run a successful five-second test

Recruit your target demographic for your test. You can do this easily in Maze by sourcing from our diverse Testers Panel (with rich demographic filters to narrow down location, job title, gender, and much more). Alternatively, if you already have an ideal set of participants to test, you can manage your own tailored database.
Banish bias. Avoid leading questions that can create bias and skew results. A good practice is to not tell users beforehand what they will have to do after the five seconds are up.
Ask the right questions. Examples you could use include:
How would you describe the design after viewing this page?
What was your impression of the design?
What is the main thing you can recall?
What did you like best/least about the design?
What would you change about the design?
Analyze the results. Depending on the questions you ask, you can gather some really useful qualitative data. Review answers to the questions to uncover points of interest—in Maze, you can actually star individual comments and automatically add them to your report to share with stakeholders.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a five-second test?

A five-second test is a user research method that helps you gauge users’ first impressions of a design. Participants are shown an image of a landing page or screen for five seconds and then asked a follow-up question about what they saw to assess memorability and effectiveness.

Why are five seconds used in the test?

According to research, 55% of visitors spend less than 15 seconds on a website. Grabbing someone’s attention in the first few seconds is essential, so five seconds is agreed by researchers to be an ample amount of time to measure effectiveness.