Nearly every day, I’m asked by a site owner, business owner or designer to take a look at their website. Five minutes after I do, I can typically only remember a couple of choice points, at best. I’m going to venture that my response is typical, so those memorable elements are vitally important.
Clue is a new tool from Zurb, the same guys who brought you Bounce, that will help you to find out what’s memorable on your site. It does this by creating a heat map, of sorts, out of your visitors’ memory.
Getting a Clue
The site is beautiful in its simplicity. All you do is load a URL into Clue and then Clue will take a screenshot of your site. That screenshot will then be turned into a test and given a short URL for you to send out. For 24 hours, you will be able to have people take a look at your site and see how much they can remember about it in 5 seconds.
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After the 5 seconds, visitors are given 5 blanks to fill in with what they remembered from your site. Those answers are then produced for you in your own dashboard where you can see what struck a viewer’s memory.
What’s It Mean?
The beauty of Clue is in how you can use the information:
- What is distracting?
- What ads gather attention?
- Is my contact information available?
- Is the attention in the right spot?
Clearly, this list could go on for ages, but let’s look at an example:
This is, indeed, the WordPress.com homepage. What’s interesting about the results is that the third most memorable is some guy with a headache. Does that send out the message that WordPress wants? Only they can answer that question.
There are nearly endless people who can put Clue to use, but I think that small businesses (mom and pop, brick and mortar) could really benefit the most. By directing attention where it needs to be on your site, you’ll be able to capitalize on those important few seconds that people remember.
Give Clue a shot and let us know what you think. Personally, color me impressed.
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