Avoid the HiPPO – Data Is Your Repellent
When engineering and modifying the visitor experience on your site, it is important to avoid the HiPPO. The HiPPO may seem innocuous, but can do quite a bit of damage. I’m not talking about hippopotamus amphibious (but left unattended on campus I’m certain one could do quite a bit of damage.) Instead, I’m referring to HiPPO as the acronym for the highest paid person’s opinion. This HiPPO can be like a bull in a china shop when it comes to web efforts and derail the best of projects. The best HiPPO repellent is data. Without data, it’s merely an opinion. When dealing in opinion, the one in power, usually the highest paid person, wins. Data is great; information is better. When it comes to the online experience, there are three types of research you can use to arm yourself for HiPPO:
1. Qualitative. This is usually in the form of focus groups, in-depth interviews, or ethnographic studies. With qualitative research you are looking for key themes. Themes can be organized via the three touchstones of intensity, novelty, and redundancy to help organize our qualitative findings: to what extent were there positive and negative ideas within a group or individual; were there new or novel ideas from the research participants; and to what extent was the information carried across groups or individuals?
2. Quantitative. This is usually in the form of surveys, polling, or analytics. While it is harder to gauge the level of emotional or symbolic currency an idea may have, quantitative data will help ensure a greater level of validity to your research findings. When it comes to the web, analytics is a great measure of what people are actually doing on your website. You may not know how they felt when they abandoned a task or completed a transaction, but now you have data to support what they are doing and not doing on your site.
3. Usability. Whether formal (using sophisticated software and video monitoring) or informal, usability is a key component in understanding what’s broken on your site. Unlike traditional quantitative or qualitative data, usability testing does not set out to prove anything, and you’re not using usability research in a manner that requires, nor promotes, statistical significance. Instead, it is there to uncover usability issues that need to be resolved to improve the site. From Jakob Nielsen’s research, we know that it does not take many participants to uncover the majority of your usability issues. For example, you can discover more than 85% of the usability errors on your site by testing less than eight participants.
These three types of research are not interchangeable. For example, just because you’ve done a focus group on a design does not mean you know if the site will work in a live environment. You need to do all three types of research on a regular basis if you plan to keep the HiPPOs at bay and deliver a meaningful experience that will prevent your site from being a commodity experience.
Photo by digitalART2
