From Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox:
In our current round of usability research, only 76% of users who expressed a desire to run a Google search were successful. In other words, 1/4 of users who wanted to use Google couldn’t do so. (Instead, they either completely failed to get to any search engine or ended up running their query on a different search engine — usually whatever type-in field happened to be at hand.) . . . Also, for this round of research we’re deliberately recruiting above-average users.
Following that link:
Unless a specific study calls for participants with a different profile, we mostly recruit people with respectable jobs — an engineering consultant, an equity trader, a lawyer, an office manager, a real estate agent, a speech therapist, and a teacher, to take some of the job titles from the first week of our current study.
What an eye-opener.
