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Workshop75 minutesUnit 2 of 8 · Lesson 4 of 4

Watching five people try it

Unit 2 of 8 · Lesson 4 of 4Index
A still from the film for Watching five people try it
The funnel says where. Priya finds five people who have never used Sona and books them for Tuesday afternoon. Your job: watch, and say almost nothing.

Five sessions find most of the problems

  1. Five is enough to start

    01 Five is enough to start

    The first few sessions find most of the problems. After five you mostly see the same ones again. Test five, fix, test again.

  2. Ask them to think aloud

    02 Ask them to think aloud

    Give a real task, like “sign up and link your bank”, and ask them to say what they are thinking as they go. Their confusion is the data.

  3. Do not help

    03 Do not help

    The moment you point at the button, the session stops being about your product. Stay quiet and count the seconds they are stuck.

  4. Count behaviour, not opinions

    04 Count behaviour, not opinions

    “I like it” is noise. Four of five people stuck on the same step is a finding. Tally what happened, session by session.

How Jakob Nielsen handled it

JA

Jakob Nielsen

Public commentary. No affiliation.
The situation

In 2000 Jakob Nielsen looked at how many problems each extra test user uncovered.

What they did

Across studies, about five users found roughly 85 percent of the usability problems in a design. Later users mostly repeated what earlier ones showed.

Why it matters to you

Run small tests often instead of one big one. Five people, fix what you saw, then five more.

Doing it with AI, and where it breaks

The move

Transcribe each session and ask a model to list every moment someone hesitated, backtracked or asked a question, with timestamps.

The trap

Models summarise what people said, not what they did. “Found it easy” can sit next to 40 seconds of being stuck. Make it quote timestamps of behaviour.

Prompt worth stealing

Here is a usability session transcript with timestamps. List every moment the participant hesitated, went back, asked a question or said they were unsure. For each: timestamp, the step, the exact words. Ignore their opinions of the design.

Build it

The artefact

A one page findings sheet: a tally of what happened across five sessions and the top three problems, each with a clip or quote.

A video call toolGoogle Sheets

0/4

The worked solution

Stuck, or want to compare?

There is a worked solution. Try the build first. Reading it before you have attempted anything is the fastest way to learn nothing.

Checkpoint

If you did the build, these take two minutes. If you cannot answer one of them, that is the part to go back to.

Go deeper

Moving on marks this lesson complete. Finish the build first, it is the part that counts.

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