A Service Design to create the right first impression in people's minds.

There is research that tends to show that people create a first opinion about what they see, like websites, 50 milliseconds! Yeah, that's fast!

Then some stories show, that sometimes, we just don't have the time to think much before we need to decide (for example, when you really need to pee and are looking at what's the right door to get to the toilet).

This basically shows us, that there are parts of our services that need to be understandable very quickly. And for those, you can use what some call "The 5 second test". The team at Usability Hub explain it like this:

Five second tests are a method of user research that help you measure what information users take away and what impression they get within the first five seconds of viewing a design. They're commonly used to test whether web pages are effectively communicating their intended message.

In the past, I've used this type of test to ensure that people understand right away on what service or website they landed. For example, we discovered that people recognised the brand not because of the logo but because of the staff's clothing in the photos. So we made sure that we selected pictures where the staff's clothing was pretty visible so that people could say: "Oh I know where I am!".

Action question

What parts of your service should you test, for example with the five second test, in order to make sure that you create the right first impression in people's minds?

Daniele's note

This is a first draft of a principle that might end up in a book of the "Service Design Principles" series.