What can happen if you forget to test early

Drawing parking spaces — 7 ways to test your digital concept early (agency scene #2)

So we’ve gathered our research, did our discovery and spoke to all shareholders. It’s time to present our concept for this new app / website / service / digital interactive. But if we get a go ahead, will our big idea make the finish line? How to create a realistic concept, without already doing the entire detail design in the concept phase?

The metaphor that I like to use is drawing parking spaces. Huh?

I borrowed it from urban planning, another creative yet complex field. There the number of parking spaces may very well be the most important requirement. Following local government regulations, a plan can only include more square meters of living space (= more money for developers) if it includes more parking spaces as well. An urban planner I know well, therefore lets her team draw those spaces while an initial concept is being developed. Literally zooming in and out makes sure the plan she’s presenting is realistic.

In the digital field you might just call it prototyping ;-). But what the metaphor communicates so successfully that we need to select the aspects essential to succes and really zoom into these early on. Here’s 7 examples:

1. Try if people understand our fancy interface by giving them a prototype. Will they see that button at an unconventional location? Let’s make a mockup and test it!
2. Prove visitors can navigate easily by sending out an online tree test. Sometimes changing one word in a menu label can make a huge difference in findability. For example, when choosing financial services, we found out visitors preferred ‘Does it fit me?’ to ‘Your situation’.
3. Check whether our design will still look good with real content by using real images, texts and titles. If we feel that rather the client needs to step up its content effort to fit the design: see below.
4. Test the client’s will to maintain the content effort for the new service. Start with creating content for a few pages. Measure the time needed. Multiply by the number of pages initially needed / published monthly. Calculate costs given the rate of an experienced (image) editor. Present budget to client and watch reaction.
5. Make sure we can get it working by creating proof-of-concept prototypes of potential bottlenecks and cutting edge technologies. To check whether it works on all devices we should switch scale — literally zoom in and out.
6. Test whether we can really trigger young people to look at your fundraising campaign by testing key images and slogans in Facebook promotions. This testing of consumer interest by pretending it already exists is also known as pretotyping.
7. Determine whether the steps in the user’s journey are clear and not too much by visualising the process. I once read about a government service where each single step was prototyped with a clerk behind a desk in a big room. It’s a great idea I’d really like to steal some day!

Just think of what you are working on right now. What is the most crucial element for it’s success?
For this blog post for example it is the title —if people don’t click on it all writing effort is in vain. So I tested it. Thanks to the friends who took the effort to judge 7 variations. Even more thanks to Fabrique colleagues Patrick Sanwikarja, Robin van der Rijst and Stephanie de Rooij who proofread the whole post.

I’m curious which ways you can imagine to zoom in on your digital concept. How have you drawn parking spaces in the past?

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