Hello, I've had on my mind for a while the topic of user productivity which could be thought of as a subject that falls under usability.
Several times I've composed emails on the subject and with each I tend to be too detailed or they turn into a rant (or both) and I don't send it. So I'm writing briefly to see if others here are interested in discussing this. My thoughts in the matter are this: The goal of a highly usable desktop environment might be to make you more productive. That means when you set your mind to a task that is possible to accomplish you should be able to accomplish it with the least amount of effort. Especially repetitive tasks. Optimizing for new user productivity may not be beneficial to experienced user productivity and vice versa. For example, many call centre applications from days gone by used green screen terminal apps that used keyboard short cuts to speed up the experienced users. Testing for user productivity is also a challenge. In my experience the more detailed or lengthy the user test is, the less the results of the test reflect real world results. Meaning that testing in the lab produced results that were inconsistent with what users were doing in the real world. As a daily GNOME user I often get frustrated because the environment seems to be working against me. For example, the focus is often in the wrong place in the file chooser dialog and programs like GIMP often revert to a default setting each time the application is launched. This caused me to start thinking about how a series of disparate pieces could be changed to work together to improve productivity. Yet I'm completely mystified how to measure and test for productivity. So here we have it, not too long, not too much of a rant. I'm just curious if anyone else is thinking about this and if anyone knows how to quantify it so that effort can be made to improve it. -- Matthew Nuzum newz2000 on freenode www.bearfruit.org _______________________________________________ Usability mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/usability
