Hello Kevin, The first thing you need to consider is what type of learnability are you considering. Consider the following types:
1. New user to a product with no domain knowledge. 2. New user to a product with domain knowledge. 3. Novice to Intermediate learning (have to define "intermediate") 4. Novice, Intermediate, expert user learning new features. 5. Expert learning. 6. Transfer learning (moving from one product to another in the same area). I see another message by Whitney that lists some attributes related to usability. She makes a great point. One additional conceptual issue is that when you are talking about learnability, you are considering the shape of the learning curve. To improve learnability is to change the shape of the learning curve. This is a constant discussion in user assistance/tech writing groups - what can we do to help people learn the product faster - short videos, better tutorials, just-in-time training (for new features perhaps)....? There is an excellent paper by some of my Autodesk colleagues in the ACM Digital Library that relates directly to your question. They look quite deeply at "learnability". Grossman, T., Fitzmaurice, G., and Attar, R. 2009. A survey of software learnability: metrics, methodologies and guidelines. In Proceedings of the 27th international Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Boston, MA, USA, April 04 - 09, 2009). CHI '09. ACM, New York, NY, 649-658. Here is the abstract: "It is well-accepted that learnability is an important aspect of usability, yet there is little agreement as to how learnability should be defined, measured, and evaluated. In this paper, we present a survey of the previous definitions, metrics, and evaluation methodologies which have been used for software learnability. Our survey of evaluation methodologies leads us to a new question-suggestion protocol, which, in a user study, was shown to expose a significantly higher number of learnability issues in comparison to a more traditional think-aloud protocol. Based on the issues identified in our study, we present a classification system of learnability issues, and demonstrate how these categories can lead to guidelines for addressing the associated challenges." Chauncey On Fri, May 22, 2009 at 10:00 AM, Kevin Silver <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi All, > > After a long hiatus I'm back designing in the realm of enterprise software > and I have been shifting my thinking back to the land of the intermediate > user. Subsequently I've been thinking a lot about designing and usability > testing for learnability–how learnable is the application? It seems to me > that there is a big difference between testing a check-out flow and a > complex interface. I have some broad assumptions in mind, but I'm sure there > are many of you who have been through this before. > > So, my questions are: > > How do you test for learnability? > > Is there a difference between "learnability testing" and usability testing? > If so, what are they? > > And maybe a pertinent question is how do you design for learnability? > > Hopefully these are good friday and pre-holiday weekend questions. > > Thanks, > > Kevin > > > ________________________________________________________________ > 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 > ________________________________________________________________ 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
