From: Adrian Howard
> That may depend on your goals. I recall reading a study (and Google is
> failing me here - so I hope somebody can back me up here - it was
> about 10/15 years ago) where they monitored completion times for a
> task along with user satisfaction. Allowing folk to change the colour
> scheme made user satisfaction improve - but made task completion time
> slower. This was a desktop app - not a web app.
>
> Happy/happier users vs efficient users.
Hmm. I expect that the study did show that, but surely it was testing
one-off approach-and-use tasks rather than longer term usage?
Just thinking it through: if you allow users to include an extra step
("Adjust text so that it is comfortable") then I'd definitely expect task
time to increase just because of the extra step. But I'd also expect users
to prefer the comfortable display.
This time penalty reduces for each subsequent task (providing the display
corrections persist - I can imagine users getting rather grumpy if they had
to tweak the display for every darn task).
In real life, I suspect that users probably won't take the time to adjust
the text etc for a one-off use of a web site or application. They are more
likely to live with it for a short experience - particularly if it's only
slightly unpleasant or mildly uncomfortable. If it's really horrible for
them, or they're planning on longer term use, then it's worth the effort to
do the adjustment.
Thus, I repeat my recommendation that we should be offering a decent default
setup.
Best
Caroline Jarrett
Out now: "Forms that work: Designing web forms for usability"
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Forms-that-Work-Interactive-Technologies/
dp/1558607102
http://www.amazon.com/Forms-that-Work-Interactive-Technologies/dp/product-de
scription/1558607102
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