I think there is another thread of logic here which is to measure the potential and realistic investment of the user as a metric for furthering 'ease of use'. For casual letter writing that the layperson does via live office or google online, ease of use is critical. For professional users of financial analysis software, ease of use maybe a trade off for efficiency once additional competency is achieved. So domain experience, and time invested in the specific application are two metrics worth noting. A third would be frequency. I only do my tax return once a year. The application I use for this as a non tax professional needs to be pretty easy to use... because next year I can not likely count on remembering the process and the commands. As for the stickyness/preference issue, I did no mean to imply that we should be so cunning or cynical as to make it more difficult to use as a marketing ploy. But early adopters are more likely to be professionals and willing to invest some learning to achieve efficency. And so compromising that efficiency for ease-of-use would be a mistake in early diffusion stages, because those early adopters, well, won't adopt it. Later, as the product and the function become more mainstream... those efficiencies are less likely to be realized and the quick in-and-out aspect of the application becomes more important (- it would seem).
On Fri, May 2, 2008 at 9:35 AM, Will Evans <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > In a way, we've seen this "erosion of value" happen before. The first > Mac brought desktop publishing to the consumer - and to this day, we > are inundated with poorly designed flyers and newsletters. > > On Fri, May 2, 2008 at 8:55 AM, Shep McKee <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > In a way, we've seen this "erosion of value" happen before. The first > > Mac brought desktop publishing to the consumer - and to this day, we > > are inundated with poorly designed flyers and newsletters. > > > > Agreed - on the other hand - no matter how "easy" desktop > publishing/design tools are - they will never replace a designer with a > non-designer. in things that matter. You either know typography or you > don't, and access to the entire adobe font folio doesn't replace training, > education, and years of critique. When notepad was replaced by wysiwyg, the > web proliferated with web sites -- 99.999% were complete crap. And even in > the design community - many print designers with strong design backgrounds > jumped on the web and made some of the most aesthetically pleasing and > completely useless/unusable/inaccessible sites around (this continues now > with agencies building flash sites like crack addicts). > > But to Mark's point - when I was doing extensive user research for a > complex quantitative software package for risk modeling - many of the users > did in fact take mastery of the very complex software package as a point of > pride - and frankly didn't want me there doing contextual inquiry because > they were frightened by the idea of the software becoming easier/simpler to > use. The were well paid, and behaved almost like priests in charge of sacred > rituals with their mystical ability to create probability curves out of > ether through incantations and sacred rituals - they didn't want a > protestant reformation of the process - their power gave them comfort. > > > ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
