Clue

Consider this — a person lands on your webpage for the first time. What do you want them to remember in the first 5 seconds? What interactions do you want them to initially encounter? Images? Text? The first 5 seconds are crucial in capturing someone's attention. You've got five seconds to wow them — screw that up and you've lost that person for good.

The typical website visitor has an attention span of 5 seconds. Try it out for yourself: go to a webpage you've never visited before, count to 5 in your head, and leave the website. Seems like an eternity doesn't it? What do you remember? If nothing grabbed you in that first 5½ seconds (or even the first 2 or 3 seconds) you probably would've been out of there and never looked back.

Because it's deadly important to get feedback on what people remember and don't remember in those five seconds, we figured we'd pull out the 5-second memory test feature from Verify and create a cool little app. Our goal was to have an app that would allow people to upload a screenshot and test quickly how memorable their own webpages, graphic designs or photos actually were.

And because we pulled the memory test out of Verify, it was fairly quick to whip up Clue and launch it.

Elementary, my Dear Watson

This wasn't the first time we pulled a feature from one of our paid apps and created a brand-new product from it. When it came to our flagship app Notable, we didn't want to go fussing with it and risk upsetting our existing customers. What we needed was something smaller, which gave our designers a lot of leeway to experiment. So we took the annotate feature out of Notable and created Bounce.

Bounce helped give folks a taste of Notable's capabilities, especially since it had no sign-ups or logins, just a field to input your URL and a button to capture the page so you can add notes. Because Bounce gave us something new and fresh to work on, we were able to improve Notable's core annotation feature. More than that, Bounce was a feeder app that provided an upgrade path to Notable. The idea being that if they wanted more features they could upgrade to Notable.

Since we had a lot of success using this approach with Bounce and Notable, we created Clue as a feeder app that provided an upgrade path to Verify.

The Sign of the 100 (Websites)

Clue, like Bounce before it, also allowed us to have a little fun. Soon after Clue's launch,we decided to do a little experiment with the app and see what people remember about the top 100 websites in the U.S. that are visited by millions of people every month. We wanted to know: What were their first impressions? What caught their eye?

For 14 days, we collected evidence (read: data) about some traffic powerhouses, such as Facebook, Youtube, and Wikipedia. When it came to those sites, what we discovered was that people remembered more content than anything else.

What raised our eyebrows, however, was that when it came to the sites at the bottom of the 100, people remembered color more than content. Case in point, Vimeo. The first thing that caught many people's eyes in the first five seconds were the blue highlights of the homepage. Take a look at their homepage below:

Our Casebook

We weren't the only ones getting a clue. Others started using the app and let us know about it, even making videos to tell us about it. In the video below, Chris Thompson, web analytics specialist at Group.com, shared how Clue helped his team make decisions. Have a listen:

As you can see from the video, you don't have to be the world's most famous consulting detective to ...

Get a Clue

Check out our other free apps: Axe, Bounce, Chop, Reel, Spur, and Strike.