High fidelity testing (i.e. how to save time and money)

High fidelity testing is a fancy term for low tech and high idea design work. Ideally, before anyone approaches a computer, stakeholders or focus groups get together, discuss, and create a website on paper. Poor ideas can be discarded or reworked before significant time and effort is put into them. Sounds reasonable, but this step is often missed in design cycles.

So what is high fidelity testing in practice? One example is the card sort method. In this exercise groups of people take a pile of index or recipe cards. On each card they write out a single hypothetical page of the website and organize them into categories or menu items. Each group then discusses their final site and collaboratively comes out with one that incorporates the best of everyone’s.

The discussion should focus on putting yourself in your user’s shoes. Imagine yourself as a target client (or even better, organize a focus group of target audiences), and individually look at each page title. Ask yourself the following questions:

• Does this title make sense to me? Surprisingly, a lot of website include a vocabulary that reflects the author and not the reader. Each title should speak directly to the audience in some way.
• Would I click on this?
• Are there any pages at this menu level that I expect or want to see that aren’t here? One golden rule is that if you’ve “sold” your customer on your product, there had better be a way for them to express that within a click (i.e. don’t make it hard for people to give you money).

Once this exercise is done, you can go through your new sitemap and flesh out each page. Then, your team will be ready to start designing the site, knowing how many pages you’re creating and what kind of assets you’ll need to communicate your key messages (photos, animations, videos, text, etc.).