Notes on the three-second test.

Visitors decide whether to stay on a small-business website in roughly the time it takes to set down a coffee cup. Eye-tracking studies put the number around two to three seconds; common sense puts it about the same. The decision is made before any text is read, before any feature is considered, before any value is weighed. It's a feeling, not an analysis.

What the visitor is feeling for in those seconds is fit. Does this look like a business that takes its work seriously? Does the typography read as confident, or as nervous? Does the photography feel like it belongs to this trade, or did it come from a stock library? Does the page feel local, or could it be anywhere? Each question is answered atmospherically, in a glance.

Before we ship a homepage, we run a simple test that we call, internally, the three-second test. We open the staging site on a phone, look at it for three seconds, close it, and write down what we remember. The exercise is repeated with someone who hasn't seen the design.

If the answers describe the trade and the place, like roofing in Houston, looks careful, looks expensive, we know the atmospheric layer is doing its work. If the answers are generic, like a clean website, looks modern, we have more work to do. Generic is failure. The whole point of the homepage is to be this business, not a website.

The test tunes typography first. A small handful of words above the fold do most of the atmospheric work. A serif italic in the headline reads differently than a sans-serif bold. We're often choosing between competent versions of both, and the test tells us which one reads as the right kind of competence.

It tunes photography second. A single hero image is harder to choose well than ten supporting images, because it carries the brand by itself. We make several at the same brief and bring them through the three-second test until one of them tells the right small story in the right small instant.

It tunes restraint third: what we remove. The test rewards homepages that say one clear thing over homepages that say five competent things. The first feels confident; the second feels nervous. Most of the editing in the last week of a project is removal, and the test is what tells us we're done.