Building the Product

How do I run a quick usability test on my app when I don't have a budget or a research team?

A starting point

You don't need a lab or budget. Grab five people who fit your user, give them one real task ("sign up and send your first invoice"), then shut up and watch where they get stuck. As a starting point, five sessions catches most of the obvious problems, and the pattern you'll see is that the thing you were sure was clear confuses almost everyone.

Go deeper

Hand-picked from around the web, each with a note on why it earns your time.

3 resources 3 link-checked Read Use

Read

📄 Article

✓ Link checked Free Beginner

Why we picked it This is the piece that gives you permission to stop waiting for a big study. Nielsen shows that just five people uncover roughly 85 percent of the usability problems in your app, and that running several small tests beats one large one because you can fix things between rounds. For a founder with no budget, it reframes testing from a scary research project into something you can do this week.

Why You Only Need to Test with 5 Users

From Nielsen Norman Group by Jakob Nielsen About a 10 minute read

Five users find about 85 percent of usability problems, so you do not need a large sample to learn what is broken
Running three small tests and fixing between them beats a single big study
The rule holds for qualitative testing of a fairly similar user group, so split into small groups if your users are very different

Open nngroup.com →

📖 Book

✓ Link checked Paid Beginner

Why we picked it This is the short, practical manual for actually doing a test yourself, no training required. Krug walks you through running a simple session in a morning a month, and hands you the scripts, checklists, and a recording setup so you are not inventing the process from scratch. It pairs perfectly with the Nielsen article: one tells you why five users is enough, this one shows you exactly how to sit down and run it.

Rocket Surgery Made Easy: The Do-It-Yourself Guide to Finding and Fixing Usability Problems

From Steve Krug (New Riders) by Steve Krug About 168 pages

You can run a useful test in roughly a morning a month, no lab and no research team needed
Comes with ready-to-use scripts and checklists so you copy a working process instead of guessing
Focus on finding the few most important problems, then fix them with the least you can do

Open sensible.com →

Use

🛠️ Tool

✓ Link checked Freemium Beginner

Why we picked it Maze is a cheap way to run remote, unmoderated tests when you cannot get people into a room, which is most of the time when you are building outside the big startup hubs. You upload a prototype or point it at your live app, set a few tasks, and share a link so people test on their own time while it records where they click and get stuck. The free plan is genuinely enough to run a first study, with the catch that you bring your own testers and response counts are capped.

Maze

From maze.co by Maze Free plan, paid plans start around 99 USD per month

Runs unmoderated remote tests via a shareable link, so testers can do it on their own schedule from anywhere
Free plan covers a real first study, but you supply your own participants and responses are limited
Works on both clickable prototypes and live apps, so you can test before or after you build

Open maze.co →