Small numbers can yield big customer insight

We often find many marketers tend to think they need huge budgets and a lot of customers involved to obtain any useful feedback on their products or services.

However, we’ve found that qualitative testing with modest budgets and relatively small participant numbers can produce rich insights that can make big differences.

In fact, while the right number of participants is a function of the number of discrete customer segments you would want to test with, our best practice-based rule of thumb is 4–6 people per segment. Keep in mind, these 4–6 people should be representative of the segment you’re interested in learning about – particularly in terms of their motivations and goals when interacting with and experiencing your product.

Perhaps surprisingly, as reflected in the table below, testing with just five customers generally reveals about 85% of all problems with a particular website or digital artifact, and testing with 15 customers tends to uncover nearly 100% of problems. (Nielsen, 2000)

Source: Jakob Nielsen’s AlertBox

The bottom line is that testing does not have to be extensive to be effective; the very act of testing—even with just 1 participant—is better than not testing at all.

And, if you’re working with smaller budgets per test, that means your total budget can be parsed to allow you to test more frequently—a best practice that often leads to better end results.