A first-impression test buys the thing your team structurally cannot produce: the reading a stranger gives your homepage before they know anything.
The discipline is in the constraint. Five seconds, then the page goes away, then the questions. Let someone study the page and you get a considered opinion, which is a different and much less useful product.
What to put in the public brief
- That it is a short timed exercise
- Roughly the sector, if eligibility depends on it
- The three questions they will be asked, so they know the shape
- That there are no wrong answers and honest confusion is the point
The URL stays private. A public brief with the link in it lets people study the page before reserving, which destroys the only thing the test measures.
What to put in the private instructions
Give the link and the exact viewing rule
"Open it, look for five seconds, close the tab." Say whether they may scroll. Most first-impression tests should say no.
Ask the three questions in a fixed order
What does this company do, who is it for, what would you do next. Fixed order matters because a later question changes how an earlier one would have been answered.
Tell them not to look again before answering
And say plainly that a wrong or confused answer is paid the same as a confident one. Otherwise you are buying confidence rather than comprehension.
Ask for their answer in their own words
Multiple choice here defeats the purpose: you would be offering the vocabulary you are trying to find out whether they already have.
Proof worth requiring
Ask for
Three written answers, unedited, plus the device they used. That is the whole artefact and it is enough.
Do not ask for
A screen recording. It adds cost and friction to a task whose value is the sentence at the end, and watching someone look at a page for five seconds tells you nothing.
When this task type is the wrong tool
If people already understand what you do and simply cannot complete a task, this will come back reassuring and useless. Run a checkout test or an onboarding run instead.
If your homepage is deliberately abstract because the product is sold by a sales team rather than by the page, a first-impression test will measure the abstraction faithfully and you will not like it. That may still be worth knowing.