Building Blocks co-founder Jonathan Whiteside's slides on the importance of testing in a web design and build project, as presented at Figaro Digital's design and build seminar in August 2014.

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The benefits
of testing
Jonathan Whiteside, Principal Consultant
Building Blocks www.building-blocks.com

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A talk about
testing?!?

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Reducing risk

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Building confidence

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Testing starts from day 1 of a
project, not once coding has
finished

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5 testing methods to
reduce risk and build
confidence.

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Requirements Testing1

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Many issues can be
traced back to wrong,
missing, vague or
incomplete requirements

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“Pages should load quickly”
“The website must support Facebook”

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Checklist
1. Is the requirement measurable?
2. Is the requirement coherent / consistent?
3. Is the requirement relevant?
4. Is the requirement traceable?
5. Are the requirements complete?
• Conscious requirements : problems that the new system must solve.
• Unconscious requirements : already solved by the current system.
• Unthought-of requirements : would be a requirement if it could be
imagined or known to be possible.

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User Testing Prototypes2

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Get feedback early
 Using “real” people
 Builds a lot of confidence with Stakeholders
 Makes the team think objectively
 Allows you to be brave
 Can be done quickly and cheaply

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“Guerilla” tools

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Integrate into Design process
 We design in prototypes
 Test every week
 Send to User Testing on a Friday PM
 Review Monday AM
 Helps set objectives for the week ahead

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Content Editor Testing3

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Internal User UX is as
important Customer UX
Failure to adopt new
CMS can lead to failure of
a new website

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The CMS must be easy to use
— Every CMS project RFP EVER

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Create CMS User Stories
and Test

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Test with unexpected
content – try and
break it!

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Performance Testing4

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Load testing is a
stress test to
simulate usage of
a live site

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Testing for…
Response time
Page load time
Server resource usage
…As number of concurrent users hit the website

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What’s
acceptable?

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Start a test

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Not that complicated…
Threads = Users
Ramp up = Rate they access the site
Pacing = Dwell time on a page
And record a user journey in the browser

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Maths is important…
Page views are not the same as users
300k page views may be delivered by 30k users
Run over an hour

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Results

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Monitorserver resource usage
 Testing performance DURING development can help
to size the technical infrastructure that will be needed
 Also get Developers focused on optimising code
 Run competitions
 No surprises on go live

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A/B Testing5

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A/B testing
1. Create 2 variations of the same page (or
element of a page)
2. Show each variation to the same number
of visitors
3. See which one has the best result (e.g.
CTR)
4. Keep in the winning variation

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Easy to create

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Clear results

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A/B testing
 Run lots of tests
 But no overlaps – false positives
 Little changes can have big affects
 Use the results to inform future projects
 Time is required for planning and thinking

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Testing is fun!

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Thank you!
Building Blocks