Stop asking UX researchers to defend their sample size

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• I’ve found the oft-repeated claim of “you only need five users for usability testing” largely true when testing something relatively straightforward and when you really only care about a handful of things. A majority of my usability studies have five to 10 users. Interviews can vary a little more because of the wider variety of interview studies, but most of my own have had sample sizes of seven to 15.

• You can’t really know when you’ll have enough data until you start collecting that data.

• How many users are needed to reach saturation will depend a lot on how many research questions there are; how complicated or nuanced those questions are; how much your team already knows about the problem space; and how many sampling criteria there are for the study, just to name a few.