Just like in development, right tools are extremely important in testing. The tools here include everything – from the automated testing tools, to the scripts, to the dummy text. Yes the dummy text! It was a good reminder when a friend was trying to evaluate a design. After he was quite happy with it, I asked him what text he had used to test the design. He had filled the content area with the text dummy content, which turned out to be dumb rather than dummy.
Most of the times you will find the Lorem ipsum text to test out designs. While its meaning is not significant, it is not completely random either. It has more-or-less normal distribution of letters in English, which is extremely useful while testing a visual design. There have been more variations as it has been played with, and there are some generators out there as well.
Guess what, using this did actually find flaws in the design, and he thanked me for goodness of Lorem Ipsum! Testing is necessary, but it is not sufficient without the right tools and techniques.
September 6th, 2007 at 6:45 am
An excellent article – you’re right that Lorem ipsum is a good idea to assist in the testing of text. However, depending on the writer, it might not always be the best distribution of letters – particularly if you are wanting to test a design intended for your own blog.
I would recommend, if designing for yourself, grabbing a big copy & paste from some documentation you’ve previously written and using that as the basis for your demo text.
September 6th, 2007 at 8:26 pm
Thanks Mike! I agree with you that there is nothing like having your own text data. And like you said sometimes generic data does not work out.
October 10th, 2007 at 6:48 pm
Yeah, Lorem Ipsum is great.
In my text editor (TextMate, OS X), you can type in “lorem”, and press tab to get a complete lorem ipsum paragraph. Lovely!