I am working on a new design for my institution's website and would like to test the design with some users. How many users do I need to bring in?
How many users should I test during a usability study?
(6 posts) (5 voices)-
Erin Mayhood
MemberWhen performing usability testing I test between 4-6 users. You will find that testing beyond this number of users gets repetitive. Jakob Nielsen's March 19, 2000 AlertBox recommends 5 users and gives a good explanation here: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20000319.html.
Posted 5 years ago Permalink -
Replying to @Erin Mayhood's post:
Yep, I would agree that 4-6 is a good number for testing something like a general communications-oriented design. That number allows for a range of answers and also gives the tester the ability to go into more detail with each user than if there were, say, double or triple that number involved.
For application testing I'd tend toward a larger number of users; in this sense I mean "application" like "something that asks people to do a certain set of interrelated tasks with a programmatic backend"...say, for example, using a new interface for a library catalog. Since something like that will necessarily be used by people with a wider range of personal approaches to the material, a larger group would expose those approaches and perhaps things needing to be tweaked (or praised!).
Posted 5 years ago Permalink -
I would add to the above excellent answers that it's good to plan for iterative testing. So you do your first tests with 4-6 users, fix some stuff -- then it's time to test again! If you keep your testing groups small, this doesn't have to be horribly onerous.
Posted 5 years ago Permalink -
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Would just add the somewhat obvious* point that Nielsen's caveat about highly distinct user groups definitely applies to a university web design. Keep the groups as small as possible, as long as those groups are diverse (students, faculty, staff, other stakeholders).
*but oft-ignored.
Posted 5 years ago Permalink
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