Usability vs. Learnability

Ah, so I never did get around to talking about Betsy Weber and Joel Spolsky's talk. They were discussing usability. They talked about doing user tests with the Aardvark gang on Copilot. Betsy flew out from Michigan where TechSmith is headquartered and flew to the Fog Creek offices in NYC.

If you've seen the Aardvark'd DVD, you find one hilarious guy. Apparently, they recruited some folks out of Craig's List, but this guy must not have been one of them. Betsy asked "On a scale of 1 to 5 with 5 being best, how do you rate your computer proficiency?". The guy said "half". And she goes "You mean, like 3?". And he goes "No, half, like less than 1". And he wasn't kidding. It's almost as if he'd never seen a mouse before. But he seemed awfully good-natured.

Betsy said that the people who get the most out of these usability tests (TechSmith makes a product, Morae, that allows you to use webcams and correlate mouse and keystrokes and video together) are often the programmers themselves. They don't realize what users can possibly do.

To be fair, this guy isn't exactly the target audience. The target audience of Copilot is for people who use computers regularly, but don't deal well when things break. In other words, they're fine as long as the programs they use behave just like they've always behaved. The tool can be used for other situations, to be fair, such as demonstrating how to use software.

In the middle of the discussion, there was a comment about usability vs. learnability. In a sense, what was being tested wasn't so much "how easy is it to use", but "how learnable it is". Someone asked the distinction between the two concepts. Joel said "Wizards are easily learnably, but not very usable. Once they know what they're doing, wizards slow people down". OK, I'm saying that in "quotes" but I'm just paraphrasing. That's an interesting thought.

It leads me to make a quick point. There's a lot of stuff on the web that's not that learnable. No one seems to have created an evolving interface that becomes more usable as you learn more (thus, wizards to start off with, and then something better as you get better, possibly with your own input). This allows the software to bridge the gap between novices and power users.

Many websites and software are aimed at the near video game generation. No instructions are provided, and you are left to deduce what to do. It's no surprise that the "dummies book" industry creates so many books. The real problem with making good online help (other than people ignore it) is that it creates a much longer development cycle. You have to think about how people learn and hope they way you picked appeals to enough folks without being totally annoying to power users.