Real Wireframes Get Real Results

Stephen Turbek over at boxes and arrows has an interesting article about usability testing with low fidelity vs. high fidelity prototypes. I’ve personally usability tested both ways and gotten good results from both. Also, I generally prefer to conduct formal usability tests with higher fidelity prototypes. If you’re going to go through the effort of recruiting a number of users, spending a couple of days on testing and even more on analyzing the results then the time required to make a low-fidelity, greyscale wireframe prototype into a higher fidelity version is neglible. I agree with Stephen, when it comes to the results from higher fidelity prototypes; users give better feedback because they have more to react to.

“Just because project teams understand the purpose of wireframes, that doesn’t mean everyone will. Similar to listening to someone sing out loud to his iPod: we only hear the singing, while the person hears the whole orchestra. Likewise, the test subject knows only that ‘the page isn’t going to look like what they see,’ but what they see is all they have to react to.”

(Via Boxes and Arrows.)

Blind group seeks change at Target.com: “Jacobson, 55, has been blind since birth. With special software that reads Web pages and his keystrokes aloud to him, Jacobson is able to shop on the Internet with Best Buy, Wal-Mart and many other retailers. But not with Target.

Disability advocates say the Target case could set a precedent requiring all U.S. retailers to make their websites accessible to the blind and others with disabilities.

‘This is the first case in the country where a court ruled that the ADA applied to a website,’ said Mazen Mohammed Basrawi, a Berkeley, Calif., lawyer who’s handling the case for the National Federation of the Blind. ‘We think thousands of businesses will take note of accessibility issues.”