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You Only Need to Test with 5 Users (2000)

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Re: You Only Need to Test with 5 Users (2000)

#101

Post by wwweston »

hycaria wrote: post #81
wwweston wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We don't care about any of the use cases in your comment Hey, everybody has to make tradeoffs, and it's certainly conceivable that the margins of disability don't matter to you, or that your phone support is your non-visual UA, or even that you don't care about search. That's only half the contents of my comment, though, the rest is about engineering benefits. Perhaps you don't care about those either? > If our Jav…

> it's just clear that there's opportunities to rise well above one's competence there. Isn't that super hostile ? Can't read between the lines there

Your criticism is at least as apt as mine.

OTOH, if someone's going to do a drive-by comment in a discussion where they lean heavily on the authority of a management position at a high-profile company, and then proceed to speak as if they don't understand how the area they interact with intersects with security and haven't thoughtfully engaged with the comment they're responding to, then I'm not really sure it's out of line to suggest that whatever authority they've been given has been questionably allocated.

Re: You Only Need to Test with 5 Users (2000)

#102

Post by Kluny »

lucb1e wrote: post #98
bravura wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't have $10? Come on.

I think it's rather about their own time. If I waste a day that could have been customer work, my company misses out on well over a thousand bucks.

Yup, this one. If I spend three hours doing ux testing the boss will be like, "Is that necessary? How much time did you spend doing that?" Lol someday when I'm the VP of engineering it'll be different, but not today.

Re: You Only Need to Test with 5 Users (2000)

#103

Post by arathore »

dalbasal wrote: post #84

The caveat here is that it depends on what you mean by "test" and what "insights" you are interested in. If you are interested in (for example) determining the optimal price and only 1/20 users buy something... you still probably need about 1,000 X (price points you want to test). In that "test" you are basically trying to uncover the demand curve (or points on it). It's a statistical question. Say you have a dating…

The article talks specifically about usability testing - though it isn't in the title but it is in the first line of the article. I don't think pricing strategies or matching algorithms and such would fall under this domain.

Re: You Only Need to Test with 5 Users (2000)

#104

Post by eddieh »

collyw wrote: post #77
eddieh wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually the icon looks like three menu items. It is a pretty good icon for signaling that it will open a menu. The hamburger nomenclature seems to be an ex pos facto name for something that rightfully should be called the menu icon.

I disagree. It took around two years of seeing hamburger menus before it clicked that it was a common symbol for a menu. Its getting worse and seems to be getting replaced by 3 vertical dots now.

I just think of the 3 vertical dots as vertical ellipsis. I often use vertical ellipsis when making a list that continues. e.g.

— History of Empire and Colonialism

— History of Religion and Society

— History of Race, Gender, and Power

  ⋮
— History of War and Society

So it naturally means "there is more stuff here" to me. YMMV

Re: You Only Need to Test with 5 Users (2000)

#105

Post by adrianratnapala »

bluGill wrote: post #91
adrianratnapala wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like this guys employer has taken first step to inventing QA. There's whole classes of highly paid engineers whose job is to do this. But they work for old fashioned, boring, companies.

The problem is QA tends to get to scripted. You need to exercise each corner of the product, thus you test A, B, C in that order - so you never find cases where testing C, A, B breaks, or any other permutation. (to be fair with any complexity it is impossible to test all permutations)

That's one part of it.

Another part is hiring a breed of test engineers who like breaking stuff and have a knack for it.

Re: You Only Need to Test with 5 Users (2000)

#106

Post by [deleted] »

dalbasal wrote: post #84

The caveat here is that it depends on what you mean by "test" and what "insights" you are interested in. If you are interested in (for example) determining the optimal price and only 1/20 users buy something... you still probably need about 1,000 X (price points you want to test). In that "test" you are basically trying to uncover the demand curve (or points on it). It's a statistical question. Say you have a dating…

[deleted]

Re: You Only Need to Test with 5 Users (2000)

#108

Post by collyw »

eitland wrote: post #82
collyw wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The old days seemed so much more intuitive when there was a crappy low res icon with text underneath.

Not sure if you are sarcastic and in what way, but if I understand you correctly you think we are better off now. I think we would be better off if we kept the best from both: the predictability and discoverability of the past with the niceness of today. Why should we have to choose between nice and usable?

No I think that having a bit of descriptive text below an icon was far more useful than far prettier world of nicely rounded corners on hamburger menus that we have today.

Re: You Only Need to Test with 5 Users (2000)

#109

Post by collyw »

eddieh wrote: post #104
collyw wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. It took around two years of seeing hamburger menus before it clicked that it was a common symbol for a menu. Its getting worse and seems to be getting replaced by 3 vertical dots now.

I just think of the 3 vertical dots as vertical ellipsis. I often use vertical ellipsis when making a list that continues. e.g. — History of Empire and Colonialism — History of Religion and Society — History of Race, Gender, and Power ⋮ — History of War and Society So it naturally means "there is more stuff here" to me. YMMV

In your context it does make sense. As a menu button it doesn't (to me at least).

Re: You Only Need to Test with 5 Users (2000)

#110

Post by miki123211 »

derp_dee_derp wrote: post #57
wwweston wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two observations: 1) A site that isn't ready for a screen reader probably isn't ready for a voice browser or other non-visual user agent. Say, an AI/digital assistant. Or perhaps even a search engine indexing bot (though for the last 10-15 years the incentives behind this often mean people will invest heavily, even non-cooperatively, in this specifically). 2) Projects for which the engineering takes into account the…

Ux Engineering manager here for a fortune 100 company. We don't care about any of the use cases in your comment. If our JavaScript doesn't work in your browser, you are a security risk and we don't want our site to work on your browser. Please call our 1-800 number to talk to a representative.

and this is exactly my problem with Fortune100 companies. Shoving your code down our throats till we hoke, without the possibility to use it the way we want.
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