What is a HIPPO?
HiPPO stands for Highest-Paid Person’s Opinion.
If you’re from the HIPPO school of design, then questions about
- layout
- colours
- images
- copy
can all be answered by the gut feeling and instinct of the HiPPO. The clue is in the title: you are making business decisions based on opinion.
With a brand new, start-from-scratch site then you have to use a mixture of HiPPOing, things you’ve read about, and your own personal swipe file of what’s worked elsewhere.
But once you have something up-and-running then you need to start a Kaizen process of continual improvement. This includes challenging your HiPPOs:
- Is this the right place for a form?
- Is this a good headline?
- What is the best colour for this button?
- How about this image – do we need it?
And you find answers to these questions by scientific methods like A/B split testing – not by HIPPOing.
