Before reading this post, you can try the fivesecondtest here.
Whether designing a website for political means or for a social cause, design will determine what part of your website (and thus of your message) people pay attention to. On average, 60 to 70% of people who stumble upon your website immediately click away. Which means you have to catch their attention within a very short period of time.
A nice tool to test the efficacy of your own online presence is fivesecondtest.com. It allows you to present one or multiple screenshots to random surfers and test which design and content elements stand out. I’ll share some of the results I got analyzing two Green Party websites – one local, one national. Both were click-tests – they seem to produce more valuable results in comparison to the memory-tests.
groen.be – national
Over 33% of people were drawn to the center photo under the caption “in de kijker” – which could be translated as “in the spotlight”. It seems like the design does a good job at attracting the eye to that photo, although the title next to it fails to attract attention. Perhaps it would be better to drop the “in de kijker” label and instead write the headline caption directly in the green bar.
About 20% of visitors noticed the logo and banner in the top section. Having your logo clearly visible on your homepage could improve brand familiarity. On a memory test, one of the respondents described the Groen! logo as the website’s home button. We could hypothesize that internet users recognize a logo on a homepage as a default home button. See to it that when you have a prominent logo on your site, people can click on it to return to your homepage.
In this case, respondents payed more attention to the top section of the site, whilst ignoring important calls to action in the sidebars (i.e. word lid, become a member, in the left sidebar, and vacatures, job openings, on the right). It should also be noted that no e-mail sign up box was visible on this homepage. Having a clearly marked sign up box and/or Facebook fanbox is highly recommended considering the fact that most visitors (in some cases up to 80%) just visit your site once, never to come back. When those users are on your site, you need to try and establish some kind of connection between them and your campaign. This can be done via e-mail sign up, Facebook connect or Twitter follows. You should test different site designs and see what works for your campaign.
Clearly, some elements within this design did draw attention. But the design failed to direct users to significant content (headlines) and to important calls to action.
groenkortenberg.be – local
Again, 36% of visitors were drawn to the logo and the top banner, establishing this section as an important design element which could possibly be used more extensively to communicate a message or focus attention an a specific headline (e.g. instead of a green, leafy photo, the website could feature the local city council faction with a group photo near town hall).
The “in the spotlight” label did attract attention, but this time, people also looked at the text in bold, under the headline, suggesting editors should creatively use the text editor to direct people to important sections of their message, even when that message is already shortened and featured on the homepage.
We can distinguish two other important design sections: the YouTube video and the featured personality box (top, right sidebar). Both did a good job at getting visitors to scan the homepage more extensively: when you compare this report with the first one, clicks were much mere dispersed over the entirety of the page.
This homepage did feature a Facebook box and e-mail sign up section. The Facebook box got some attention, the e-mail sign up form got none. This could imply that respondents were more drawn to social media connectivity than to old-school e-mail communication, but site design (i.e. the Facebook box was more central than the e-mail form) could also have played a role.
This design did a better job at drawing attention to important content and to one call to action (i.e. become our fan on Facebook). But it should be clear that there’s still room for improvement.
Did you use the fivesecondtest for evaluating your design, or do you need some help with interpreting the results? Just let me know in the comments or contact me.
