You have the option to conduct usability tests to assess if users are able to effectively use your product. These are generally done via screen sharing from a PC/Mac or a mobile device. You should prepare a number of smaller tasks for the users and ask them about their experience with your product. For usability tests, 5 users seem to be the magic number. These 5 users will usually point out your key usability issues.
You can also do user interviews to find out if people are interested in your product, website or idea. For this, we have to understand how they usually tackle the task or how they use existing solutions. This should give you a deeper understanding of your target audience’s needs and behaviours. User research generally needs a bit more data to be concise. 5 users should give you a pretty good sense about the viability of your product/idea, but be prepared to conduct further research with additional people to gather more details.
Your ultimate goal is to understand behavior and motivation. The interview/user test is a way for you to have a better grasp on issues you're probably missing as an insider. Instead of talking about general ways of doing a given task, try to ask about more specific details. These things will help you understand rather than just gathering answers to specific questions.
We have a separate article, where we dive deeper into the optimal number of testers for valuable results.
To give you a better idea of how some of our clients are using PingPong, we have listed a few insightful case studies on our customers page.
