UX/UI Design: Foundations to Practice · User Research for Design
Continuous Research on a Limited Budget
A founder without a dedicated research budget or team can still build genuine research into a regular practice, and the specific low-cost methods available are often sufficient for the kinds of decisions a small team actually needs to make.
Research specifically examining how many usability problems get discovered as more users are tested has found that testing with a relatively small number of users, often cited around five, tends to reveal a substantial majority of a product's major usability problems, since most significant issues are ones several different users independently encounter, meaning each additional user beyond a handful increasingly reveals problems already identified by earlier participants rather than genuinely new ones [2].
- Testing with a relatively small number of users, often cited around five, tends to reveal a substantial majority of a product's major usability problems.
- This makes several smaller, ongoing studies more practical and more useful for a resource-constrained team than one large, expensive study that quickly becomes outdated.
- Attaching a small research task to already-happening work, like watching one user before a launch, builds a genuine ongoing habit without a dedicated research budget.
- A founder's easiest-to-reach participants often don't represent the broader population the product needs to serve, echoing sampling bias concepts from market research.