A Fundamental Mind Shift For Usability Testing

This idea, that five to eight users will reveal 85% of all usability problems, is an old myth. It’s not true. It’s never been true.

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The big problem with the five to eight user myth isn’t its mathematical impossibility. It’s that it misrepresents the true value of user research.

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The real value of user research comes from increasing our understanding of who our users are.

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Usability testing is, at best, a reactive technique. The developers build something, then we test to see what flaws they built into it. We iterate as they try to remove flaws, but we’re always reacting.

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if we focus on only finding problems and not learning more about our users, we’ll never get our teams hooked on the biggest value of user research.

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We need to move away from the problem-finding mindset. The teams that know everything possible about the users are the ones that deliver the best-designed products and services. That’s the mindset change we need.

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Posted on August 6, 2019