5 Seconds Changed How I Think About Design
It takes about 5 seconds for people to decide what they think.
That limitation turned into the framework for my internship at Bright Orange Thread (BOT).
I am Leah Morris, a junior honors Design & Innovation student at Grove City College, and I joined BOT as a summer intern when Homepage Peels was still a loose thread of an idea…
How I Contributed to Homepage Peels
Over the summer and into the fall, I helped BOT launch Homepage Peels, a peel that puts a company’s landing page in front of 25 real users for 5 seconds to capture unfiltered reactions and turn them into actionable insights.
My role involved:
- Researching the target audience
- Building and launching Homepage Peels
- Translating user data into clear visuals
- Sharing insights through social content Making the process repeatable
My experience at BOT strengthened both my design skills and my thinking.
Sample slide design from a Homepage Peel
Here are 5 things I learned from putting together Homepage Peels:
1) Start messy
What becomes a flawless ceramic piece always begins as a rough, messy lump of clay.
The lesson I took from this is simple:
Progress comes from starting, even when it’s messy.
This lesson hit hardest during one of the project’s most daunting challenges: turning 75 user responses into a clear, simple, and effective informational design.
The design had to:
- Stay consistent with BOT’s brand
- Be repeatable for every company we tested
- Provide genuinely useful insights for real clients
I didn’t know where to start, so I threw together rough sketches and played around with all kinds of ways to show the feedback.
With guidance from our team during daily critique meetings, I steadily refined the design through over 30 iterations.
On the left is where the work started, with messy feedback and ideas still forming. On the right is where it landed after 30 iterations: refined, insight-driven, and ready to perform.
2) See the glass as half empty
It’s not pessimism—it’s a healthy mindset that makes good designers even better.
No work is ever truly perfect; it just eventually meets a deadline. The key is to be critical of what’s missing from the glass, noticing where improvements can be made so the final result is as strong as possible.
BOT’s unique approach taught me a valuable lesson:
Being critical and open to feedback is how great work gets made.
I saw this lesson in action at BOT, where every client-facing deliverable goes through multiple rounds of feedback. Each piece is reviewed by several eyes before it’s sent out.
When I first started as an intern, I focused on small tweaks and obvious mistakes.
Over time, I adopted the team’s vision and learned to spot bigger opportunities to make Homepage Peels clearer and more engaging.
Being critical isn’t about pointing out mistakes for the sake of it. It’s about aiming higher and making every piece of work the best it can be.
3) Talk Less
I had a bad habit of over-explaining my design decisions.
That became especially clear while I was setting up Homepage Peels, and it led me to an important lesson:
Let your work do the talking.
Our daily critique meetings reinforced this lesson, as we met online as a team to edit, refine, and push our work to be the best it could be.
The moments I learned the most were often the quietest, when I simply showed a design without explaining it. In those instances, the work had to speak for itself, and any gaps in clarity became immediately obvious. These moments taught me more about effective design than any discussion ever could.
Why? Because our users won’t get explanations either. I realized that if I had to explain a design choice, it probably wasn’t clear—or necessary. This insight shaped how I approached the entire Homepage Peels campaign.
4) Judge quickly
When you spend hours—or days—iterating on a piece, it’s easy to lose perspective.
You get so close to the work that you forget how someone seeing it for the first time will experience it.
The nature of this campaign left me with a lesson I’ll never forget:
Design should be understood at a glance.
Step back, look with fresh eyes, and trust your instinctive judgment, because that immediate reaction reflects what real users will feel.
Homepage Peels is all about first impressions. Website visitors form an opinion about a homepage in roughly 5 seconds, so every word, image, and layout choice must communicate clearly and quickly.
If something isn’t instantly understandable or attention-grabbing, it’s lost. Even the smallest design or copy decision can make or break the experience.
This approach has pushed me to simplify, focus on what matters, and remember that great design isn’t just about aesthetics. Design is about instant comprehension.
5) Stop designing for you
It’s easy to create work you like. Anyone can do that. What sets a great designer apart is knowing how to shape your design to:
- meet the user’s needs
- align with the brand’s identity
- achieve the campaign’s goals
The final and most important lesson I learned at BOT is this:
Good design serves the brand, not the designer.
Hendrik-Jan, BOT’s owner, asked me to identify our brand’s “design anchors”—the consistent visual elements that define the brand. Some were obvious, like fonts and colors, but others were subtle: slightly rounded buttons, images with drop shadows, and small details that might easily be overlooked.
I thought I was starting from scratch when I first began working on Homepage Peels, which felt intimidating. In reality, BOT’s orange thread, blue accents, and other identified brand elements were already part of the canvas.
Using the brand’s anchors as a toolkit let me push the Homepage Peels deliverables further and ensure every piece, including social posts, aligned with the brand without unnecessary guesswork. Consistency doesn’t limit creativity—it guides it.
LinkedIn graphic: consistent with BOT’s brand and the Homepage Peels design
Final Thoughts:
Throughout my internship at BOT, I learned lessons that extend far beyond a single project. Working on the Homepage Peels campaign helped me grow into a better designer, carrying five lessons that will shape my career moving forward. I am eager to apply what I’ve learned as I continue my education and step into the workforce.
Find out more about Homepage Peels
Homepage Peels delivers real, actionable feedback from users on website homepages. If you enjoyed reading this blog post, I encourage you to take a look at the Peels we’ve created! You can explore 3 existing Peels here: