Hi Don,
Thanks for your reply. I appreciate the breadth of information in the general area already available hence my specific question. Perhaps I didn't ask it as clearly as I might have.
There are many different interpretations and theory models of ease-of-use, and a probably similar number of theory models, interpretations and targets of measures of productivity. There are also lots of imprecise overlaps between measures and theories of both using concepts that are taken to be defining between the two yet apply to both in different ways (e.g. efficiency and effectiveness). In addition, there are significant challenges to validity of many claimed outcomes that haven't included variety of expertise and value in workers and tasks.
That’s why I was asking if anyone was specifically working on this issue.
I'll give a simple practical example.
The design of Apple hardware and software is in many ways focused on improving ease of use compared to products from Microsoft. For non-technical and non-expert users this translates into improved productivity for some tasks. Yet, for expert users, productivity measured in time and effort for complex tasks for individuals is commonly higher for Microsoft products. In many cases, this is due to reduced number of operations per task in Microsoft interfaces rather than Apple (the increased number of steps is what helps Apple products to have increased ease of use).
For this simplistic example, in practical real world business situation involving a large mix of users, it is reasonable to ask about the basis and validity of decisions involving judgements about using ease of use vs productivity to make decisions about business issues. The problem applies in a variety of ways across business units from individuals to firm level. A consequent question is of how to choose and define appropriate metrics and analyses in a coherent manner that can be validated and justified in theoretical terms as well as pragmatic ones. This is fundamentally a theory of knowledge problem that has to be tightly aligned with external world events.
The issue is also of interest because the same type of analysis (if resolved) is also potentially applicable to a variety of other situations.
Hence, my question asking if anyone on the list is specifically working on this issue of sorting out these concepts and theory, and for pointers to any specific publications that address this issue in detail.
Best regards,
Terry
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-----Original Message-----
From: [log in to unmask] [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Don Norman
Sent: Tuesday, 22 July 2014 5:22 PM
To: PhD-Design - This list is for discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design
Subject: Re: Ease-of-use vs productivity
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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