Site Contents
Design Testing to Future-proof your Web Site
Testing Methods
- Paper Mockups:
One method of testing your site design is to ask typical visitors to work through paper copies of your site.
Then, you ask the volunteer to talk-aloud as you record what they are thinking as they move through your design.
Your goal is to find confusing navigation or information chunking issues so that you can correct them.
- Checklists:
With the checklist method, a small group of professionals search through the site to see whether it conforms with accepted principles. The set of rules that form the basis of the checklist is called a Heuristic.
This method is the most popular method of site testing, but the results are not as useful in predicting visitor reactions to the site as the Paper Mockup method.
The benefit of a checklist is to search for issues that the designers might not have thought of, however, the designers should have used the checklist themselves during the design process.
A checklist approach to site testing might include the following:
- Content Quality: Content is...
- Relevant
- Attractive
- Has appropriate depth
- Has appropriate breadth
- Is timely
- Is current
- Site is easy to use: Design communicates clear...
- Goal
- Structure
- Feedback
- Site promotes sales or return visits
- Emotional Response: The site encourages...
- Positive reactions
- Interest
- Attention
- Appropriate pace or stress level
- Web Stickiness: Site encourages...
- Community
- Personalization
- Tailor-making of Content
- Updatability
- Expandability (What happens if the site is super-successful?)
Of course, different people can hold different opinions about what these terms mean. This is the reason that the Paper Mockup method should always be used.
- Prototyping:
This testing method involves setting typical visitors in front of a computer that is running a rough prototype of the site, and watching the volunteer work through the design.
This method has the visitors talk-aloud as the users and the screen in front of them are video taped.
This method is expensive, and only within the range of large-budget development projects (because of the need for the lab setup).
This method comes later than the other testing methods, and if the other methods are not used before this method, comes too late in the development process to catch some design problems.
Link to the Testing Recommendations (Test Path)
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