A related issue that fits better into Don's customer satisfaction discussion than it it fits into ease-of-use per se is the feeling of productivity.
Anyone who drew things in Adobe Illustrator 25+ years ago probably remembers all that time spent staring at the screen while the computer caught up with whatever you were doing. I had many designers tell me how much less efficient the Mac was to just drawing with pen and ink like we had been doing. I would challenge them to add up all of the time spent filling, shaking, and cleaning a Rapidigraph pen, prepping the inking surface, etc. My conclusion was that Illustrator was more efficient (even before adding in the questions of print production) but that previous methods always left you something active to do and Illustrator and the Mac teamed up to assemble the "wasted" time into chunks that were big enough that you noticed them.
This is neither part of an ease/productivity binary but can have a great effect on keeping people in a work flow, allowing people the feel of control, and reducing the illusion that the tools are diminishing the tool users rather than enhancing them.
Gunnar
Gunnar Swanson
East Carolina University
graphic design program
http://www.ecu.edu/cs-cfac/soad/graphic/index.cfm
[log in to unmask]
Gunnar Swanson Design Office
1901 East 6th Street
Greenville NC 27858
USA
http://www.gunnarswanson.com
[log in to unmask]
+1 252 258-7006
-----------------------------------------------------------------
PhD-Design mailing list <[log in to unmask]>
Discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design
Subscribe or Unsubscribe at https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/phd-design
-----------------------------------------------------------------
|