My review of Five Second Test

I was test­ing a new logo out and I wanted to get people’s first im­pres­sions and also what they thought the com­pany rep­res­en­ted, so I ran it through Five Second Test. Five Second Test helps you fine tune your land­ing pages and calls to ac­tion by ana­lyz­ing the most prom­in­ent ele­ments of your design only giv­ing the user 5 seconds to re­view it.

Even though they have paid pack­ages, by re­view­ing oth­er peoples pro­jects I could build up points that would al­low me to get feed­back res­ults for free. The more points I have, the more re­sponses I can re­ceive. Here in lies the prob­lem with this ser­vice.

Qual­ity re­views

While the site says up front that they can­not guar­an­tee the qual­ity of the re­views, I can see how some web or graph­ic de­sign­ers would take ad­vant­age of the free feed­back by care­lessly re­view­ing oth­ers just to rack up points so someone can re­view their con­cepts for free.

Nev­er­the­less, I still feel it’s a de­cent ser­vice that I will use again, but I don’t think I’m com­fort­able pay­ing for it just yet. I think if they had tar­geted audi­ences I could se­lect from (like oth­er user test­ing ser­vices) and paid re­view­ers, I would prob­ably be more read­ily to pay for this ser­vice, but the site speaks of no such thing.

I also had to take in­to ac­count that there will be some mean people who trash your designs and not give you con­struct­ive cri­ti­cism. So this is to be ex­pec­ted when hav­ing the pub­lic re­view your work.

De­sign­ers re­view­ing de­sign­ers

For all I know, all the re­views could just be oth­er de­sign­ers like my­self re­view­ing each oth­ers work to get free re­views of their own work (this sounds a lot like Concept Feed­back which is an ex­cel­lent site for it’s mar­ket).

The prob­lem with oth­er de­sign­ers re­view­ing oth­er de­sign­ers’ work is that we think dif­fer­ent than our tar­geted audi­ences. We need feed­back from people who don’t have a de­sign­er’s eye. While their re­views are help­ful, this may not be the best solu­tion, but it’s worth us­ing.

The Tests

I found it fun to re­view oth­er people’s work and I’d hap­pily do it again. I did about 16 tests each giv­ing my hon­est opin­ion and re­sponse to the re­view­ers ques­tions. I par­ti­cip­ated in the Five Second Test, the Click Test and the Nav Flow Test.

I feel like you need a little more time than 5 seconds to re­view a concept, be­cause most people spend more time on a site be­fore they click away. And be­cause of the win­dow size you re­view the test in, you have to scroll up and down to see what you’re look­ing at, this takes time away from ac­tu­ally re­view­ing the concept and be­fore you know it, it’s gone. So I think 10 seconds would be best — but I get the idea of the 5 second test.

Over­all, a de­cent ser­vice.