[LAU] An appeal to famous artists?

[Simon Wise]

On 07/08/11 15:13, Emanuel Rumpf wrote:
> 2011/8/4 Fons Adriaensen<fons at linuxaudio.org>:

> What's a "usability test" ?
> Make some non-introduced users install,configure,use a (new) software
> and see how far they come.
>
> There's the hitch: Depending on which users you choose, results will differ.
> Take a long MS Windows user and as a result, you're software is
> unusable without a File MenuItem ;)
>
> Anyway: Since this is something that actually happens, if any user
> foreign to your software tries it,
> the results might even be valuable !
>
> Actually the conclusion for a usability test is somehow pre-known:
> If you introduce anything new, unknown to the user, you have to
> - explain it
> - make it obvious
> - use pop-up hints
> - add context help and description
> - all that, without steeling to much time from the user
> - show only task-related items
> - hide complexity
> - ...

surely there are at least two very different ideas about usability - and they 
can be contradictory.

1/ Allow someone opening up an application for the first time to click around 
and discover what it might be able to do before they start looking at any manuals.

2/ Allow someone who uses it everyday to do the things they do frequently as 
quickly and ergonomically as possible, assuming they have already spent some 
time learning the system.


The first helps sales, and without it many people won't look further, but the 
second is what makes something like DAW worth using.

If you have lots of time you can of course do both, but if you aren't paying 
developers from sales revenue the amount of work to achieve 1/ is more difficult 
to justify.


Simon