There are a couple of points I wanted to follow up on in this
discussion:
Will Sanbury talked about how usability testing is not meant as a
replacement for QA. I think this is a really important point --
usability testing isn't a good way to measure (or improve) product
quality, but it is a good way to find out if you built the wrong
thing. In this context, using terms like "sample size" and "margin of
error" are just not that meaningful.
My practical experience has been that usability testing just a few
participants usually uncovers enough issues to keep the development
team plenty busy. If you test with 5 people, 80% of them encounter a
bunch of the same issues, and it takes the team several weeks to fix
those issues, what good does it do to keep running the same test on
another 25+ people to identify additional issues that only 10% will
encounter that the team doesn't have the capacity to work on? As Steve
Baty said, it's much more effective to test iteratively with small
numbers than run big, infrequent studies.
On Oct 2, 2009, at 4:51 AM, 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.
I basically agree with this, except I would say that testing
wireframes isn't really usability testing.
-Adam
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