Once you have a plan, you can consider finding people, put your ideas into their hands, and observe them. Each of these steps requires you to also have some consideration in order to find the right people, guide them through the process, and extract useful conclusions.
Conducting usability tests
Recruiting participants
With usability testing, your goal is to identify the biggest rocks in the user's path that prevent them from achieving their goals successfully. You don't need to test with a large number of users to identify those big problems. Studies have shown that testing your product with 3 to 5 users is enough to catch most of the big usability issues. Testing with more users quickly results in diminishing returns...
