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Comment by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF | Hacker News Reader

> This year one of my students claimed to have done a user experience test with 30+ people, all of which came in person to his house during a period of 4 days. This is extremely unlikely, not to say absurdly unrealistic.

I'm not familiar with conducting a user experience test. Why is this so unbelievable? (Also, the rest of the story is kinda hilarious; there will definitely need to be some standards and process changes in academia.)

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You have to get people to actually come to your house voluntarily in the middle of the week to sit down and do some boring stuff in your computer. And it all just clicked with everyone’s schedules in four days. I usually can’t get people to even answer a 5-minute online form, let alone get them to drive to my house. Maybe he’s just popular (which he isn’t, by the way; and a confessed previous cheater.)

depends on the situation but generally most people aren't that enthusiastic to be your UX guinea pigs, and it isn't that much fun to administer the same test so many times in a single day (think of how bored your optometrist sounds as they ask you which lens is better). I worked at a shop that had a target of 3-5 users for any given UX testing because usually it starts to get repetitive after that - you tend to hit the diminishing returns portion of the curve.

So if you assume that the UX tests were short (20-30 minutes) you're still talking ~15 total hours spent on UX testing, or two full work days. That would be a surprising amount of time.

As someone else said, it's conceivable that they ran very short studies on a large number of people in the context of having a party or a couple of small gatherings, but it does seem unlikely overall.

Just to recap: very generously, a college student with money to spend (that might sound like a joke but I consider fortunate circumstances) convincing people that it’s worth their time to sit through a usability test actually going through with it “for the lulz”. The part about a person being willing to do a bunch of work to avoid doing a bunch of work makes sense (typical “mental gymnastics”) but it kinda falls apart at 30+ real people legitimately agreeing. It’s ironic that a single-digit amount is just as useful; that’s even a more believable lie.

(And this real-life scenario where every request is answered with “Coming right up!” and a convincing “successful” completion of the request just cracks me up. My sympathies go out to the people to whom this is a genuine problem.)

Thanks for explaining!

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