If the first click that someone makes on a website is ‘correct’ (i.e. takes them towards their goal), then they are two to three times as likely to find what they’re looking for than if their first click was in the wrong direction. First-click testing results can tell you if your customers are able to find what they’re looking for quickly and easily when they land on your webpage, and if not, where they click instead.
To create a first-click test, you’ll upload screenshots, sketches, or wireframes of the pages you want to test, and invite people to complete tasks by clicking where they think they’d find the right information.
First-click testing results enable you to make user-centered decisions for your webpages about:
Here’s an example task from start to finish to show you what first-click testing is and what it can tell you.
For this task, we decided to test the Bank of America’s homepage (please note that this case study and all of its data is for example purposes only). We wanted to find out if most people relied on Search to find information, or if they would rely on looking around the homepage.
Participants were presented with this task:
To complete the task, participants clicked on the screenshot where they thought they’d find the right information. Once they had clicked they were moved on to the next task:
Overall, 38 people completed this task, taking an average 2.09 seconds.
Chalkmark results are presented as various clickmaps that display where people clicked, with each map being customizable depending on the data that matters the most to you — you might want to see individual clicks, or large sections showing percentages only, for example.
For this task, we wanted to compare the ‘Search’ to the ‘find ATM’ button, so we increased the grid size so that the clicks around the ‘find closest ATM’ button were grouped together.
In answer to this question, we found that 18% of people went to the search bar, and 82% clicked on the ‘find closest ATM’ button lower on the page.