We had 3 users coming in every 4 weeks and held an intense 1 hour 1-on-1 interview with them, whereas 6 colleagues from the product team, where observing and taking notes from another room. My part was observing, taking notes, sorting the notes and learning, learning, learning! We not only tested the basic user flow.
Later, when we already developed the main user flow, we went out on a uni campus to do rapid user testing. We installed lookback – an amazing app for taking videos of the user, while using the product – and asked 5 students, which fit into the pizza.de persona profile to simply order food quickly. Why 5 is the magic number? Because after 5 usually the results begin to repeat. The out take we’ve got from this small test was amazing. For example the freshly designed dish details didn’t work, because the users didn’t see the difference between the dish details and the menu. As the app is held in similar colors and a consistent UI, we figured out, that it was a bit too consistent in some parts 🙂 So we optimized again. And the iterative product design cycle began once more.