Before the day · Page 18
Recruit your test users
For you only
At 15:30 real users react to what got built. Everything about that sentence is decided the week before. This page is the recruiting manual.
How many. Aim for five. The number is not folklore: Jakob Nielsen's research at Nielsen Norman Group found that about five users surface roughly 85% of the usability problems in a round of testing, and that returns fall off fast after that. Be honest about what the number buys you, because NN/g is: the finding is about qualitative rounds, spotting problems, not statistics. That is exactly what a build day needs. Five people per team would be lovely; five for the room is the floor. Rotate them across teams and each team still gets three or more real reactions.
Who. The brief is your casting call. Write "a returning 25-year-old Zara shopper" and you know who to go find five of. Write "users" and you will end up testing with whoever was near the kitchen. Recruit people who roughly match the user line of the brief, and treat "roughly" kindly: close in behaviour beats identical in demographics.
Where to find them in a week. Customers your sales or support team can ping ("want to see something early and unfinished?" flatters more than it scares). The floor below yours: people from other departments who have never seen the product count as fresh eyes for most consumer briefs. Your office building, the cafe downstairs, the street. At Ionian Technologies in Thessaloniki, the team walked out and tested with strangers on the street. Brave, and it worked.
If your user is unreachable in a week, like a heart surgeon, test with the closest proxy you can find: a nurse, a med student, a person who books surgeons' calendars. Or pick a different challenge for your first day. A brief you cannot test turns 15:30 into another exchange of opinions.
The mechanics. Book them for a named 30-minute slot inside the 15:30 to 16:00 window, calendar invite each, one reminder the day before. Thank-you gesture: a voucher, good coffee, or an honest tour of what they helped decide. Tell them exactly what they are walking into: "four rough prototypes built today, your job is to try them and think out loud, you cannot break anything and you cannot be wrong."
PRO TIPS
- Recruit six, expect five, be fine with four.
- Do not use people from the build room. They stopped being users at 9:15.
- Your sponsor is not a test user. They watch, they do not steer.