Seeing is believing. Observing just a handful of users interact with a product can be more influential than reading pages of a professionally done report or polished presentation. But what if a stakeholder only has time to watch two or just one of the users in a usability study? Are there circumstances where watching some
There are a lot of misconceptions about when it is and when it is not appropriate to test with five users. There’s no reason to take an extreme position on this issue and think it’s never acceptable or always the right number. Instead you should understand what you can and cannot learn from just a
Some people think that if you have a small sample size you can’t use statistics. Put simply, this is wrong, but it’s a common misconception. There are appropriate statistical methods to deal with small sample sizes. Although one researcher’s “small” is another’s large, when I refer to small sample sizes I mean studies that have
If you’re in User Experience, chances are you probably didn’t get into the field because of your love of math. As UX continues to mature it’s becoming harder to avoid using statistics to quantify design improvements. One of my goals is to help make challenging concepts more approachable and accessible. Last week Jim Lewis and
It’s usually the first and most difficult question to answer when planning a usability evaluation: What sample size do I need? There are some who will just say it doesn’t matter what the sample size is because usability is qualitative…and after all any users are better than none. Others will say that you only need
Timing, luck and perseverance all play a role in making a successful product. But so does observing and understanding your customers’ problems. The number of customers you need to observe will depend on how common customer behaviors are and how certain you need to be. Building a successful product means building something that customers want
If you’re familiar with usability testing then you’re familiar with the magic number 5. Five users will on average find most of the problems that affect at least one-third or more of your users. If problems are less common, then you will need to test more users to find and fix them. On many high-traffic
Wondering about the origins of the sample size controversy in the usability profession? Here is an annotated timeline of the major events and papers which continue to shape this topic. The Pre-Cambrian Era (Up to 1982) It’s the dawn of Usability Evaluation and the first indications of diminishing returns in problem discovery are emerging. 1981:
Will users purchase an upgrade? What features are most desired? Will they recommend the product to a friend? Part of measuring the user experience involves directly asking users what they think via surveys. The Web has made surveys easy to administer and deliver. It hasn’t made the question of how many people you need to
With usability testing it used to be that we had to make our best guess as how users actually interacted with software outside a contrived lab-setting. We didn’t have all the information we needed. Knowing what users did was in a sense a puzzle with a lot of missing pieces. Web-analytics provides us with a
