Two-Minute Offense
The Two-Minute Offense is a concept featured in one of my design books. The goal is to help you develop an eye for design by looking at and analyzing live web pages quickly — in two minutes.
The Two-Minute Offense is the first program where you are interactively forced to participate in the critique process. It’s not intended to be an in-depth usability study. After all, we’re only giving ourselves two minutes to look at a page. Obviously there are subtle usability issues that can’t be detected in two minutes. The goal is to get you to look critically at other sites so that you can look critically at your own site. Try it out.
Reaction from a designer:
I think this is a helpful tool. It makes usability seem less intimidating and more instinctive. Lots of people are scared of it (usability), I think — this exercise helped point out that fixing the big problems (the ones you see in the first 2 minutes) can go a long way.
The Two-Minute offense can be a helpful exercise for professionals, to help get their brains moving in the morning and keep their skills sharp. And also remind them to consider the big picture as well as the tiny little details of usability.
Caveats:
- Only works with browsers that support the IFRAME tag.
- The site has been tested extensively on IE5+, NS4.x, and NS6 — on Windows platforms. Opera 6 doesn’t work. Sorry. It probably won’t ever work.
- The Two-Minute Offense is set up for 1024 x 768-pixel screens. Sorry.
- Some types of sites will screw up the Two-Minute Offense. Culprits include programs that use Java and certain types of Javascript.