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.