Lessons

Lesson Info

The 5 Second Usability Test in Landing Page Design (and how you can use it now)

how do you design fans and welcome back as we progress through the course. Now, I really want every lecture to have practical takeaways, ideas and techniques that you can implement in your landing pages right away. So while this lecture, we are going to go back to the five second test and it's a topic and it's a test that we've spoken about in the past. We're going to really talk about headers and sub headers in the context of five second tests and we're gonna get a little bit more practical with how you could actually use it to increase the clarity of your headers and sub headers on your home pages and your landing pages, which will ultimately help increase your conversion rates because your visitors are going to have a clear understanding in a shorter time frame exactly what it is that you offer. So let's just jump into the slides real quick. So just getting back into the background of the five second usability test, A very quick refresher in a study published in 2000 and six in the ...

behavior and information technology journal. The results showed that it takes users just a half a 2nd, 500 milliseconds to form a first impression of your brand landing on your site. Right? That's an incredibly short amount of time. That means you don't have much more time to convey to them what you do. Right? So, well Times that by 10 and give you five full seconds to kind of convey to your users what you do express your users, what you do? Give users a chance to understand what it is that you sell the three most popular test questions for the five second test. If you remember was one, what is the name of the company to what does the company sell? That's really the most important question in the five second test. If you're gonna, if you're just going to ask one question, that's the question you want to ask, what do you sell? And three a little bit more subtle, what value do you provide to your customers besides for the actual product or service, what benefit comes out of it? Right. So the classic example, if you sell vacuums, the benefit is I get to have a cleaner room. I have a cleaner life, right? No one really wants to sales one on one, right? No one wants a vacuum. They don't want a vacuum. You want a clean room. So what? That's the third question. If you could convey that in five seconds, you're doing a great job. Oftentimes like you can't, this is something which is true and everything. When you're so involved, you lose objectivity. When you design something. When you see a website every single day, when you're involved with your products and services and your manufacturing and your employees and your vendors, you lose objectivity. You can't understand. You literally cannot perceive what, how a first time visitor experiences your website or experiences your landing page. The beauty of a five second test is it allows your customers your potential visitors to write your headlines for you and if you ignore that, then you're ignoring what will ultimately make your landing pages more successful, you have to really understand that you do lose objectivity. The main takeaway here is that headlines and sub headlines, which should be present on every page and we will go back to um effective writing of headlines and sub headlines later in the course. But the takeaway here in this lecture is that your headlines and your sub headlines are the most important things to test in a five second test. Right? That's what you really want to focus on headlines and sub headers. Of course, in your, of course, on your homepage, you're gonna have a headline and a sub headline, I hope. But even on every inner page there should be a header and a sub header as well to give that user the clear context of where they are on the site, you'll see a lot of websites now leaving the clarity in the sub header, They have this headline, which is like very marketing, e and gimmicky and then they have the, which expresses nothing about what you offer. I'm gonna show you a couple examples of that very soon in a second and then the sub headline is kind of a description, what you actually offer. It makes no sense. You want to give the clarity in the headline. Okay, that's practical takeaway, number two Number one, headlines and sub headers are the most important thing to test number two. If you have a line that expresses what you actually do, that should be your headline, the emotional payoff or the or the catchy phrase that might be unique. Your tagline, that should be your sub header, okay? In most cases and that there are times where it's that's not necessarily statistically the right choice, but in most cases, as a rule of thumb, here's a page from one of our client's websites. This is actually their homepage carries negotiating is a big company. We've been working with them for a couple of years. We have a fantastic relationship with them and we're currently in the process of a full complete website redesign. This is the homepage there, a world leader, They are the world leader in negotiating seminars. They run Over 300 seminars a year in over 100 cities across the world. They've trained most of the Fortune companies, right? They know what they're doing, they've been around for 40 years, um and they're they're big stuff but as we're focusing on redesigning their site, we really wanted to find out Do users understand what it is they do when they first land on their site. So we asked 50 respondents from around the world, 12% of them knew what this company did, incredible. Um An incredibly low percentage rate. Look at some of these answers here, right? I'm not sure they appear to host a conference negotiating tactics seminars. If there's a question mark at the end of someone's response, they don't know what you do. Teaching training, teaching courses, no negotiating programs, That's a good one. Trade negotiators, rewards programs. No idea sells food pizza. Like, I mean this is really enlightening information for this company as well as we're redesigning this site, 12% of respondents got it right now. Of course you can make the argument will, no one really hangs out on the site for five seconds. You're right. That's not the point though. Of course, if they scroll down the page to continue reading, they're gonna understand exactly what it is we do, of course, But if you remember we go back, don't make me think, reduce the cognitive load, remove the question mark from over my head, Don't make me figure it out. Let it be self explanatory, let it be self evident, do whatever I can to increase clarity to increased simplicity, that will increase perceived value. It will increase the ability of a person and their attention and their awareness. 12% of respondents got it right over here. This is the homepage for zendesk, a big company that offers software that helps you chat and and create support tickets and email back and forth with customers and clients of yours that have questions, right? They build software for support teams, This is their website, the headline reads, let's make things better and their sub headline reads, Zendesk build software for better customer relationships. Okay, before we go further, I want to just point out that I happen to find the the hero image section quite silly because if you look, if you look closely there's a video that they want you to watch and this top circle in this geometric um in this geometric heap isn't actually is actually the play button, but it looks the same as everything else. Right? So you might not really think that that's the play button. So that's another thing that's frustrating, confusing and it will probably be overlooked by the majority of visitors. So I just flipped around oftentimes just by flipping around the headline and the subhead line, you can get better results. But interestingly enough, not really this case, it didn't work. So I just quickly flipped around the headline in the sub headline. I actually misspelled the word Well I did. It should have been building, not builds we build software for better customer relationships. Let's make things better. The original 15%. got it right. And in my edited version, only 10% got it. Right. So right, so this is a test that showed that the original version of how they had it was actually gonna be was actually working better to convey the users what they did, but don't be fooled. 15% is still bad. is 15%, is 15%, is 15% of people within five seconds should understand that you build software for customer relationships, Right? And only 15% of people knew that based on reading this headline and sub headline. So even though our test wasn't successful, we didn't come up with a better version yet, but at least we know we need to keep trying. Right? So that headline and subhead are really important when it comes to clarity. Here's the homepage for Mint. Mint is a another software company, a big company that offers online software, mobile apps for managing your daily finances. Right? So it connects up to my bank accounts. I could track expenses, I could see every month how much I've spent on travel, how much I spent on entertainment on groceries. It's a great app. It's great app used by a lot of people. So their headline, once again, this is what I'm talking about. If you want to know what I meant by you have this gimmicky sort of market test this line, this tagline that might be unique branded to your company and then you have the line with clarity. So they got it wrong right there headline reads that Horizon might be closer than you think by itself. It means nothing right that Horizon might be closer than you think. Zero meaning zero context, zero clarity with with what it is you actually sell or offer your customers and then the sub headline, the sub header reads will help you get there by managing money and budgets better every day. Still not that clear. Right. Nothing about the fact that we offer software. Nothing about the fact that this is an iphone app. It just says that somehow if you engage with us you will have the ability to manage your money better every day. Does that mean are we private consultants? Are we a team of bankers that will come and sit with you and teach you how to read a P and L sheet. There's no clarity but the little clarity that there is is in the sub header and it's not in the headlines. So I quickly just flip it around, right. And if you look at how I flipped it around, it doesn't even really make that much sense. I didn't want to come up with my own version. I think I could have come up with a much better version of a headline in the sub headline but I just flipped it around will help you get there by managing money and budgets better every day. And then the sub header, that horizon might be closer than you think. I just flipped it around. I changed the header with the sub header. We've got some interesting results in this five second test. I didn't ask users to just write what they thought the company did. I gave a list of a few different options. So I gave the right option which was software that helps people manage their business finances and personal finances and I get a few different other options. One of the other options I gave, it was a multiple choice select was vacation booking software. Right? This is not what they offer. They do not offer vacation booking software. In the first version of the design, 16% of respondents thought that this company offered vacation booking software after looking and reading their headline and sub headline for five seconds. Right? You have the woman in the background and the image of big hero image. She seems to be on vacation near a beach maybe on her phone taking a picture, right? Nothing to do with finances. 16% of people thought that Mint, which is a software company that offers financing apps and financing tools. They thought that they offered vacation booking software. Okay. In the new design, only one person, 4% of respondents, I thought it was vacation booking software. Right? So we drastically decreased people feeling that it was something totally what the company wasn't. On a side note, there was no statistical difference or no statistically significant difference between the amount. The percentage of people who actually selected the right answer. But remember this was multiple choice. So there was only a few options and one of them was anybody who got any sense of money and business. I was able to find the right answer. So I made the test easier. But the main point here is how many the large percentage of people who felt that this was vacation booking software when in fact it was not just by flipping the headline around. Right, that's a big takeaway. Think about even if you're not able to rewrite your headline and sub headline, just sometimes flipping them will create significantly positive results. So as you can see clarity in your headlines and sub headlines is really important. I want you to start thinking about that as you go through each of your pages on your website using the ideas that we just learned in the previous lecture about removing question marks, that quest for clarity, are you being as clear as possible in your header? Are you providing the clarity of your sub header? And should you, should you be providing that clarity in your header and then using the five second test, using the questions of the five second test to actually test your theories and to take away your subjectivity and introduce objectivity back into the design picture. So, I hope you enjoyed this lecture. I hope you're getting some beginning to to really build on these practical takeaways techniques that you're gonna start implementing right away into your landing pages. Thanks for watching this one. And we will see you very soon in the very next lecture