Its got to the stage where I can no longer read Mashable or Techcrunch because of the saturation and influence that these so called ‘social media’ experts and journalists seem to be having on the industry. This so called next movement has unfortunately made everyone (even my Mum and Dad!) an expert in social media (whatever social media really is?) so it seems. I used to be an avid reader of Mashable and Techcrunch however i started to notice articles that were just plain crap observations, for example recently i found this post on Mashable, ‘The top ten Twitter trends this week.’ I mean WHAT THE HELL! This made it into an article! This is a classic example of so called social media biting itself in the ass. Im a savvy internet user if i want to know what’s trending on Twitter i’ll check the Twitter homepage. Social media really just stands for, ‘We’re going to make your browsing experience twice as complicated by bombarding you with pointless facts an figures and plain obvious tips on how to promote your business using Twitter, Facebook and social networking.’ I mean HELLO! bands and teenagers have been doing this stuff for years on MySpace, Hi5, and Bebo its nothing new.

It’s just plain marketing bullshit, and it just purports to makes anyone an expert if you have a Twitter or Facebook account, so in effect it just bastardises people who actually are knowledgeable in this area. I don’t class myself as an expert in anything. If your an expert you have nothing more to learn and we all have something to learn even more so on the internet.

Social Media = Way too much noise!

I happened to stumble upon the site and added a usability test for the homepage of papermashup.com. It was completely effortless to setup and took about 20 seconds.

Setting up a test

Signup for an account, login and click ‘Create a new test’ on the homepage. Unexpectedly the site’s usability is amazing. you’ll see an overlay like below where you can upload your design and select the type of test you want to perform.

Managing your tests

Once you’ve created your tests you can go ahead and manage them to see the response and feedback. It’s worth noting that people voluntarily leave their feedback and if you do signup you’re encouraged to help other designers out. You can also set your test up so non-logged in users give feedback.

Gathering feedback

There are two types of test you can do, either a click test or memory test. With the click test the user has to click on elements of your design and label what each section is. with the memory test you have a certain amount of time to remember everything you can about the design, you then have to list the main features. The click test even displays the data on a click map so you can see hotspots where users have clicked as shown below.

Conclusion

I was really impressed with fivesecondtest.com, it gave me the opportunity to not only get free user feedback from like minded designers but also allowed me to help others and give my feedback. All in all i’d recommend fivesecondtest.com to anyone!