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.).

6 Steps to Creating a Website

By Robert Blizzard

Step 1: Why?

The first and most important step when creating a website, or having another person do it for you, is to spend some time deciding why you want one. A lot of time and money can be wasted if you don’t have a clear idea of what you’d like to achieve with your web presence.
Examples of goals for a website:

• Leads for your business


• Information for your customers


• Community for your members

Step 2: What?

Once you’ve decided what you want your site to do, the next step is to decide what information you’ll need to achieve those goals. Before writing the copy, or choosing images though, it’s a good idea to create a sitemap that will define, down to the page, what will be in your website.

Example sitemap:

• Home


• Products


• New


• Used


• Testimonials


• Contact

Now that you know where the information is going, the hard part of actually writing the content down starts. Keep your content short. Users are unlikely to read more than three lines beneath a heading. Be sure that you make every word count.

Step 3: Layout and Design

This is where you may need professional help. You’ve all the pieces at this point, you just need to put the puzzle together in an attractive way. There are decisions to be made at this juncture, like whether your site will incorporate Flash, what screen resolution it will support, and the colour scheme.

Step 4: Getting Online

By now you’ll have a working website, but no one can see it if it’s in your My Documents folder. You’ll need both a domain name and a host. Take your time choosing a domain name, as it will be central to your marketing (on and offline) for as long as you keep it. Exercise caution too when picking a company to host your website. There are many to choose from, but I like to filter down to a local company that I can actually visit if I need to.

Step 5: Promotion

I’d like to say you’re almost done, but an online presence is going to involve an ongoing commitment. Right away, your site might as well still be sitting in your My Documents folder since no one out there will know it exists. You’ll need to submit it to business listings, search engines, and online directories to generate traffic. You’ll also need other websites to add links to yours. This is best done, not all at once, but a little at a time.

Step 6: Maintenance

If you’d like people to return to your website, you’ll also need to maintain it. New content, special promotions, and the occasional redesign will keep your website from gathering dust.