I was not in this week’s lecture but after going over the lecture content I have come to learn the importance of user testing when creating a product.
This subject was something that was covered in the previous semester hence I’m quite familiar with it; throughout my research I uncovered the different types of usability testing and what kind the kind of data they provide, qual. data provides raw data, this is because the researcher can observe the users’ behaviour as they interact with the product; whereas quant. data is indirect due to it usually being surveys, this is usually used to assess a user’s performance when testing a product. And the conclusion I arrived to was that qualitative is more reliable due to how it strengthens a designers empathy towards their target audience’s needs.
It helps designers to learn the frustrations users come across when they’re using a product/ trying to accomplish a goal; testing allows you to find problems in the early stages of design before launching it, and this allows for a good user experience. qualitative testing is done in person whereas quantitative is done online.
Research states that you don’t need a big group to find most usability problems. Testing with just 5 users will uncover about 80% of the issues in your design.
The reason a few amount of people works is becasue the first few testers will spot the obvious issues, and after about 5 user tests researchers will start to hear the same feedback over and over hencforth it is recommended that 5 users be the optimal figure for testing; and besides this doing more user testing would time consuming and a waste of resources. What I uncovered is that it is best to use 5 user testers at different stages of a project, after fixing the issues that the first 5 spot, a designer should redo a user test with 5 new participants.
I think qualitive testing is very useful during the building phase of a product, quantitative testing can be added once the product has be tested a few times and is complete, this allows for a good data collection that will help designers do what needs to be done to meet their target audience’s satisfaction.
Why You Only Need to Test with 5 Users
Something new I learned throughout my research is the amount user testers are needed for a qualitative usability test; prior to uncovering this I thought that what would be best would be to gather as many testers as possible so you can spot and fix as many issues as possible, but as the research states this method is futile and a waste of time and resources, I will be moving forward with this new knowledge and I plan to incorporate it in my ways so I can create intuitive interfaces for my target audience