Tuesday, March 13, 2018

What's recommended for the number of users to use in qualitative and quantitative testing?


I'm currently rebuilding our entire intranet from scratch, mostly because the tech behind is out-dated and it has been proved that a lot of information is difficult to find.


Though that is beside the point, what I am wondering is what would be the optimum amount of users to use for qualitative and quantitative testing with a userbase of around 1000 users?


Is there a general rule of thumb for both based on the total number of users you have? or is it just say 5 for qualitative and 10 for quantitative?


What would be the best approach?



Answer



In Why You Only Need to Test with 5 Users Jakob Nielsen suggests:




The best results come from testing no more than 5 users and running as many small tests as you can afford.



However, rather than focusing on the number of users, it might be better to focus on the number and quality of the tasks:



Usability test tasks are so critical that some people argue they are even more important than the number of participants you use: it seems that how many tasks participants try, not the number of test participants, is the critical factor for finding problems in a usability test.



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