On Wed, 2009-02-18 at 16:35 -0700, Moriah Waterland wrote: > At the Caiman meeting this morning, some of the conversation around > usability seemed fuzzy. I think that we were conflating two different > issues. Our overriding goal is that all use cases should be "easy". > However, what easy looks like is not necessarily the same for each of > the different use cases.
First of all, be careful of confusing "usability" with "ease of use". They're not really quite the same thing. I also don't think it's terribly realistic to set a requirement (for any non-trivial product) that all tasks be 'easy'. The most frequently-performed tasks should certainly be easier to learn and quicker to perform than the less frequently-performed ones, for the type(s) of users you expect to be doing those tasks. That doesn't mean that other types of user would find them 'easy', or that less-frequently performed tasks shouldn't be comparatively 'harder', however. Cheeri, Calum. -- CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer Sun Microsystems Ireland mailto:calum.benson at sun.com OpenSolaris Desktop Team http://blogs.sun.com/calum +353 1 819 9771 Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems
