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
After I conducted my first usability test in the 1990’s I was struck by two things: Just how many usability problems are uncovered and how some problems repeat after observing just a few users. In almost every usability test I’ve conducted since then I’ve continued to see this pattern. Even after running 5 to 10
Failing to plan is planning to fail. It’s both good practice and often necessary to have a test plan before beginning a usability test. Like any plan, it should not only lay out the framework of the study, but also help identify problems with the methodology, metrics or tasks while something can still be done
Are you sure you did that right? When we put the effort into making a purchase online, finding information or attempting tasks in software, we want to know we’re doing things right. Having confidence in our actions and the outcomes is an important part of the user experience. That’s why we ask users how confident
You need users in order to do usability testing. It can be a small scale do-it-yourself usability test or a large sample corporate usability test but finding available users can be a burden. It’s often cited as one of the reasons usability testing isn’t done more often. The process by which you find your users
The core idea behind usability testing is having real people trying to accomplish real tasks on software, websites, cell phones or hardware. Identifying what users are trying to do is a key first step. Once you know what tasks you want to test, you’ll want to create realistic task scenarios for participants to attempt. A
When conducting a usability test, gathering input on a design, or testing new features, we strongly recommend the 1:1 moderated session over group sessions. However, we usually aren’t convincing others to run 1:1 sessions. Instead, we spend more effort convincing others of combining the traditional in-person 1:1 session with other methods. We find we can
When we have a good experience with a service or product, we enjoy it, tell our friends, and will probably use that service or product again. But when we have a frustrating or poor experience, such as the occurrence of message boxes relentlessly popping up during sporting events, we hate the product, tell our friends
One of the biggest barriers to conducting usability testing is the cost and time involved in testing. Moderators have to bring users to a dedicated location, test each one (usually one at a time), and only then get results from only a handful of users. Unmoderated usability testing is a technique using software such as
Usability testing is artificial. We do the best we can to simulate a scenario that is as close to what users would actually do with the software while we observe or record them. However, no amount of realism in the tasks, data, software or environment can change the fact that the whole thing is contrived.
