Gee, I never thought Terry would need the standard basic reply
On Tue, Jul 22, 2014 at 7:57 AM, Terence Love <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Wondering if anyone is doing any work on measuring differences in and
> between ease-of-use and productivity in interface design, product design
> and
> software design?
>
There are hundreds (thousands) of studies on this topic in the HCI
literature -- see the CHI conference proceedings.
going to Google scholar (scholar.google.com) and doing a search for
"usability and productivity" yields 71,000 results. My
partner, Jakob Nielsen has published frequently on the topic.
Another god source is the HCI bibliography:
http://www.hcibib.org/
entering usability and productivity yields 141 results (a quick scan did
not impress me -- google scholar seemed better).
*A comment on many of the studies:*
A lot of the published stuff is nonsense. Academics who do not understand
how business really values things. The standard line goes like this:
Usability can save 5 seconds on this activity. We estimate that 25 million
people must do this at least 7 times a day. So that is a loss of
(5*7*25*10^6*200)/(60*60) hours per year wasted, at a cost of (multiply by
average salary per hour). (Assuming 200 workdays/year)
Nonsense. True, but nonsense nonetheless. No business executive i know of
would take that seriously, with one exception. The exception is companies
with workers who do repetitive jobs over and over again. There, seconds do
add up.)
Don
Don Norman
Director, DesignLab, UC San Diego: Think Observe Make
[log in to unmask] www.jnd.org <http://www.jnd.org>
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