The 5-people method
You’re wrong until proven right. That’s the ugly truth of building a startup. It doesn’t matter how great your product looks or how many cool features it has, in the end it’s the users who’ll decide if your product is valuable. Therefore you need to validate your ideas – the sooner the better. All it takes is a brief chat with 5 people.
It starts with a guess
Creating new products always starts with guessing what people need and what they’ll pay for, or even better what they’ll recommend to their friends. Unfortunately, you never know in advance if your guesses are correct – most of the time they’re not, as it’s almost impossible to predict human behavior with perfect accuracy. So what can you do? At my company Blinkist we try to make sure that product and features are on point with customer desires even before they’re released from our hacker dungeon.
Validate, validate, validate
After you’ve launched something new, it’s easy to use certain metrics to see what features people use and how they move through the service. But at Blinkist, we’ve realized we need to be one step ahead of the usual post-launch analysis. We have to validate our guesses before we invest time and effort into solving complex coding issues and diving into pixel-level details. Most of the time, startups do not have unlimited budgets or endless amount of time at their disposal, so what can you do? Build a huge user research department? Probably not. We’ve found that validating guesses doesn’t have to be complex or expensive at all. There’s a simple and effective way of testing even small features before anything is actually produced: We call it “The 5-people method.”
The 5-people method
Say our goal is to increase our conversion rate by redesigning a purchase flow for a subscription. We might find out that customers have trouble finding the information they’re looking for (damn you, previous mistaken guess!) To address this issue, we combine user input with our own assessments and some good old-fashioned common sense to brainstorm different ideas how to improve the user experience. We then transform this guess into a simple, bare-bones prototype with a few elements users can interact with.
And then the fun starts. We ask 5 random people for feedback on the prototype. They try it out and we collect their feedback, with each session lasting no more than ten minutes. The first user gives us lots of new insights on the usability of the screen. The second tells us more, but not as much as the first one. The amount of new information gleaned decreases with each chat, and after 5 people, we’ll know about 80% of all usability flaws. We use this feedback to challenge our original guess and refine the prototype – back to the drawing board. We redesign, move stuff around and make things bigger or smaller. We clarify, rephrase and add or remove information. After this, we ask 5 new people to try it out. We repeat the process as many times as needed until we feel confident that the prototype can’t get much better.
Why is 5 better than 500?
Staying true to our theory, we didn’t arrive at this process by just guessing. In their extensive research, Jakob Nielsen and Tom Landauer demonstrated that the number of problems found in a usability test decreases with each new user tested. Makes sense, right?.
Take a look at this graph, where the Y-axis shows the number of usability problems found, and the X-axis shows the number of users who were asked for feedback. As you can see, the number of problems a user can help find diminishes with each additional person tested.
This is because with every added user, you keep hearing about the same problems over and over again. This is a waste of time if you want to get actionable insights from your tests quickly. Basically, after the fifth user you are usually just wasting your time. By limiting the amount of people we talk to during each iteration of the prototype, we can focus on continuously refining our design.
Asking five people is the new coffee break
What’s also nice about talking to just 5 people is that it takes less than an hour. Because it’s such a short exercise, you’re way more likely to be proactive about it, compared to if you had to plan and execute a huge user testing project. Do something rather than nothing at all. And boy, will you feel good actually knowing that your design works before you’ve even written a single line of code or started worrying about shadows and gradients.
So, get out of the building and talk to 5 people. They’ll give you more insights than you could ever find on your own. 5 people is all it takes.
Niklas & Kimmy
When developing prototypes for testing we recommend proto.io, and when you want to test stuff really quickly, go with POP (popapp.in). And don’t forget good old pen and paper; We always do wireframe scribbles of any design before moving on to more advanced stuff.
