Building websites that support your marketing strategy can be a expensive and time-consuming business,and if we get it wrong, it can prove a costly mistake leaving you with a site that fails to convert.So you have this wonderful sales funnel that drives traffic to your website,and then it all falls apart. You should build a prototype that you can test before you commit to the cost of a final build.
How to build a prototype cheaply and quickly,how to test your prototype with real users,and how to integrate testing at all stages of your website build.Isn’t prototyping and testing time consuming and expensive?
Well, that’s a matter of perspective.Yes, building a prototype does take time and cost money,but look at your alternative, okay,you have endless meetings where you discuss the right approach for your website,you go through specifications,you form committees, you have discussions,you think of the man hours that are wasted trying to workout how to best build a website.Okay, and then think about the risk of building something that’s less than optimal for your conversion funnel that’s letting you down.So you go through all of these assumptions and presumptions and discussions only to end up with something that doesn’t work at the end of it.
Is that worth the risk?
Also, a prototype, if it’s done well,can replace the need for the long specification,you won’t need those endless discussions,you build something, you try it out, you iterate it,and then once you’ve done that,you can go into the proper build, the expensive part.Prototyping is not open to misinterpretation,unlike a long specification document,everybody knows what you’re building, and it’s tested too.It’s a no brainer as far as I’m concerned.
How do you test a prototype that you have built?
Okay, well, first of all,we need to create our prototype, right.And again, this doesn’t need to be complicated.A prototype can be as simple as a sketch you’ve done on a piece of paper, right.It really can be that easy,but we probably want something a little bit better than that,we want something where you can move from one page to another because we’re trying to create a sales funnel.You can mock that up in PowerPoint or in Keynote or whatever you want, but my personal favorite is a tool called Balsamiq.It’s an online tool and anybody can use it.You need no ability whatsoever.If you can use Word, you can use Balsamiq,and it’s got drag-and-drop components that you can pull into the page,you can pull a menu bar in,you can pull a carousel in, a video in,whatever you want, and you can assemble these pages and make a very simple prototype of what it is that you’re trying to achieve,and it will take you minutes to do, not days,and it will give you something that you can test.Yes, a designer will need to work on it later,but it’s enough for you to do that initial experimentation at a minimal cost.
With a basic prototype, you can start to run usability ability testing,and usability testing will transform the effectiveness of your marketing campaign.So usability testing focuses on three things,do they get it, does the user understand the basic concept,can they find stuff, and can they do stuff.Right, so it’s a very simple mechanism for understanding whether or not your tool is going to work,your app, your website, whatever it is,you can even run usability testing on an email campaign.And it is such a simple thing to do,but it will be utterly transformative because if your website or app or whatever it is is easy,if people get it, if they can find what information they need,and if they can do stuff, then you’re golden.
Okay, and testing is very simple to do as well.It’s not complicated, you can test with anywhere between three and six people, right.Testing with more than six people really isn’t worth it, there’s been research by Jakob Nielsen,who’s a big usability testing expert, based on thousands of hours of testing, and he basically says the return, the additional problems that you find beyond having six people diminishes rapidly,so it’s not really worth your time and effort.
So six people is the sweet number,but if you want to do things quick and dirty,you can even do it with three people,that would work as well. Also, when it comes to usability testing, you don’t even need to worry too much about getting a demographically-correct audience. We’re trying to establish do people understand what you’re offering, can they find the stuff on it,and can they do the things that they need to do.That’s not about taste, it’s not about aesthetics or anything like that, it’s basic usability,can they use it.Now, in that case, we’re all going to struggle with very similar problems.So you can basically use anybody outside of your company to do this type of testing,friends, family, doesn’t matter, anybody you want.The only exception is if your campaign is being aimed at either children or the elderly,and the reason for this is because with a very young or a very old audience, they have various physical and cognitive issues that change the way that they interact with tools.
So if you’re testing with children,I’m sorry, if you’re trying to reach children,then test with children.If you’re trying to reach old people,test with old people, but other than that,you can use absolutely anybody for this kind of testing.So we know that we want to test with about six people,we know that we can use pretty much anybody outside of your company.You don’t want people in the company ’cause remember,they’re going to have the same mental model as you,and you’re looking for people that think differently to you guys.Then what you do is you meet with these people one at a time, about 40 minutes per session is the maximum that you want to spend with them.And you want to give yourself a little bit of time between each session to think about what you’ve just seen.
