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"Plans are nothing; planning is everything." - Dwight D. Eisenhower

If you have a site structure to test and some tasks in mind, it’s tempting just to dive right in – set up the test, email a bunch of users, and watch the results come in. Easy, right?

However, you’ll get a lot more out of your testing if you take a step back and ask yourself some basic questions, such as:

Why am I running this test? What am I specifically trying to find out?
What am I testing – the whole tree, or just the top levels? Or two completely different trees?
Who should I test – existing customers, or prospective ones too?

How you answer these questions can radically change how you run your test and analyze your results.