5. Participants

Define the target group of your project and get representative users to use the software. We want to test how usable the software is for normal people. As Benson, Müller-Prove & Mzourek (2004) advise: users on mailing lists [and IRC] are not typical users but rather experienced ones. It is enough to test with 3–5 users to find out most usability issues (Nielsen, 2000): Nielsen also notes: The most striking truth of the curve is that zero users give zero insights. So go get some participants and start testing!