Five users, one afternoon, and the majority of your usability problems identified.
Usability testing has a reputation for labs, recruitment agencies and long reports. In practice, five people and an afternoon will surface most of what is wrong with a screen.
Five users, then diminishing returns
After about five participants the same problems keep reappearing. That makes testing cheap enough to run before every significant release rather than once a year, which matters far more than statistical rigour for interface problems.
Give tasks, not opinions
Never ask do you like this. Ask them to complete a real task, such as find the price for ten users and start a trial, then stay quiet and watch. Where they hesitate, backtrack or ask you a question is the finding. Their design suggestions are usually less valuable than their confusion.
Recruit close to home, carefully
Customers, people from a nearby business, anyone in your target group who has not seen the product. Avoid colleagues and anyone who knows how it is meant to work, because they cannot un-know it.
Write findings as one line each, ordered by how many people hit them. A short prioritised list gets acted on; a forty-page report gets filed.
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