Usability Testing: Zero users give zero insights by Miriam Manso on August 13, 2019

Summary

Which is more productive: testing five users or five hundred?

Jacob Nielsen answers, “The best results come from testing no more than 5 users and running as many small tests as you can afford. [...] Testing with 5 people lets you find almost as many usability problems as you'd find using many more test participants”.

Let’s look at the numbers:

• First, run a usability test with 5 users — this usually detects 85% of your design problems.
• A second test with 5 more users can identify the remaining 15% of your design’s usability problems.

Below you can see the table in which Nielsen shows the percentage of problems detected as the number of users tested increases.

Takeaway

The giant, Google, has promoted Usability Testing with no more than 5 users in the design of their applications — the same ones that we use daily here in Liferay.

Read More

• Why You Only Need to Test with 5 Users

• How Many Test Users in a Usability Study?