Experiences shared

I asked my friend who has experiences of usbility testing in a company last summer. She shared with me about how they did testing. Because she was asked to promise never to share data, reports, and ideas with anyone, I only got the information of the overall process.

Steps:
1) test plan
2) protocol (script for moderator)
3) set up software and hardware for recording
4) go through the test with user
5) observe and take notes
6) edit the videos
7) write the report
8) present to designers and other stakeholders
9) put document and video on intranet

How to sample?
Rule of thumb: target audience of the system/product/website
Target audience might be different in age, gender, experience, etc. To avoid bias, don't recruit your subjects from only one category.

Number of participants?
5 will be enough for general usability test; 15 for card sorting tests.

The company my friend worked for has its own customer database, so they can always recruit people from there via emails. They need to take many criteria (age, location, status, etc.) into account by having screening questions to filter out unqualified people. But they only had 2 weeks for recruitment, which is too short, hence people responding and participating were not as representative as they were supposed to be.