5.1 Family, friends, coworkers, flatmates

Family members are easily reachable but most often not the best choice for testing. Either they know what you do and are thus technically inclined or they feel obliged to help you, making it a non-ideal situation for testing. Friends, coworkers and flatmates are very good test participants as long as they are no designers. Friends and flatmates likely have lots of different professions and backgrounds, giving you various insights. The problem with this group of people is that you can not conduct tests with the same people too often. Usually, interview participants are not invited again for the next three months and only three times in total. Otherwise they will become »professional usability testers« who just say what you want to hear and don’t act naturally.