Thomas, In my experience, it depends.
Obviously, issues stemming from visual design decisions made after the wireframe stage will not be caught in wireframe tests.
At the opposite end of the spectrum, misfits between the designed workflow and the habits/expectations of the target audience can be caught very early, often in storyboard tests.
A final product test can mislead as much as a mockup test if, for example, the browser in the lab reveals more of a web page than the browser the customer uses, or the network connection is much faster in the lab than in the field, or customers have a far different attitude about made-up data than real-life data.
I wouldn't recommend uncritically extrapolating a lab study of a product at any stage to the eventual experience of the users. But testing at various stages of development helps to catch important issues that get harder to remedy as time goes on.
Larry On Oct 1, 2009, at 9:51 PM, Thomas Petersen wrote:
If we are talking wireframes or any other replacements for the real thing whatever you will find have very little if anything to do with what you find in the end. The real issues arise after the launch not before and the real question is not how many participants but at what point participants should be used.
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