When you are ready to develop a website, you certainly want the website you develop to give users the best user experience. Being able to accurately and quickly evaluate a website is an art and a science, but this art or science can be learned quickly. Here are a few simple tips to help you evaluate your webpage in 30 seconds or less, helping you see clearly which parts of your webpage are well designed and which parts are not good enough.
Pay attention to the first place your eyes land– Open the website, but don't open your eyes until the site has fully loaded. When you open your eyes, what is the first thing you see? Does it immediately tell you what this webpage is about? Or do you need to spend a few more minutes browsing to figure out its content?
Look with squinted eyes– Slowly close your eyes toward the screen, but don't close them completely; the content on the page will gradually become blurry. Pay attention to the movement trajectory of your eye focus, and pay attention to your brain activity now—it is making intuitive reactions based on the limited information currently captured. Do you notice any changes between the different areas of the page? Your brain is comparing the areas of the page, and your eyes instinctively capture the part with the most obvious contrast between areas.
Scan the entire page diagonally from the top-left corner to the bottom-right corner– This is the natural reading direction of your eyes (though in some cultural habits this is the opposite). Because the human brain receives information in this order, your page content should be displayed clearly and logically in the order from top-left to bottom-right.
About the "five things" technique– Go to your website's homepage, browse for five seconds, then name the five things on that homepage you can remember. Look for only five seconds, then let your brain recall five things from the page. If you did it, compare the five things you recalled with the top five pieces of information you want your website users to get on that page. In such a short time, the human brain can only notice that much information, and most browsing users are not patient enough to view more page content; they start clicking links to enter detailed pages at this point. These reactions are the first step of the user experience your page gives them, so make sure these five most noticeable things reflect their value.
Find the intersecting lines– Find the intersecting lines between the different module sections of the page, and try to keep your eyes fixed on them. Do your eyes involuntarily land on the most important area of the screen? A good webpage design can cleverly attract your eyes to the area that gathers the most information in the shortest time—usually a few seconds.
Learning to critically evaluate a website is an important skill that needs to be honed. It requires you to see issues from a user's perspective; the better you make this role switch, the better user experience approaches you can discover.
Too many companies would rather waste a lot of time arguing about a specific detail of the website, while ignoring this more important prerequisite work. This will put your users—and ultimately your company's business—in an unfavorable situation, because this "more important prerequisite" is: what makes users feel something about your service or website.
Take a look at your website, spend 30 seconds, and use these techniques to evaluate it. After all, this is what your main potential users will do after typing in your URL—whether or not they are aware that they have such thinking patterns and browsing habits.
Source: http://www.vaikan.com/critique-a-web-page-in-30-seconds-or-less/