You Only Need to Test with 5 Users (2000)
This is an excellent point, and the much more fascinating corollaries:- a product designer/manager of something with 1,000,000 users won’t learn more about usability than a product designer/manager of something with 15 users. All those measurements of flows and secret at scale analytics data is sort of worthless for the purposes of usability.- people with 15 users worth of learning about usability instead of 0 users are way undervalued, while people with 1,000,000 are way overvalued- “we don’t know until we test it,” the #1 refrain of big company design nowadays, is intellectually bankrupt for most free software, since if it looked bad for 15 users it’s probably going to still be bad for 1,000,000- after you’ve shown something to 15 people and they don’t like it due to usability problems, you’re extremely unlikely to find 1,000,000 more who will like it.This also appeals to my instinct that there is something learnable about design, that great design is achieved by people and not by massive datasets.