KathySierra asks in her latest post how we can get users to really use all the features the product has to offer. ¹ Some people have responded that as long as the product does what they want, they don’t care about any of the other features.
So I drew this:
Getting from here to there: Features are incidental
Generally I think it is more interesting to improve the documentation or discoverability of the existing product to get users to do what they want, instead of expanding the feature set of the product to allow the few power-users (or only the developer of the tool!) to do all the things they want.
Discoverability is a part of usability. It allows users to skip reading the manual. Knowing more or less what they want to do, they can use the tool with basic skills such as reading text and clicking links such as to better learn what they might want to do and finally do it.
#Usability
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Sure, discoverability is important, but increasing it is often very costly in terms of other important “usability” parts.
For example, icons are usually viewed as a very good thing for “discoverability”. But they draw the attention away for the “productive” control methods, like the command line, keyboard shortcuts, etc. And it’s while they are still availbale, only with icons added. It’s part of the novice/expert mode myth, I guess.
Personally, my favorite tools for increasing “discoverability” are various tooltips, status lines and, of course, auto-completion on the command line.
– TheSheep 2006-08-09 14:53 UTC
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I actually don’t like icons at all. The kind of discoverability I like in Oddmuse is how you view a page, and find the history link at the bottom. If you follow it, the history page will contain another link at the bottom, showing you a filtered list of changes for the page you’re looking at, with log entries going as far back as possible. Thus, filtering of Recent Changes and listing all changes ever made to a page is hard to explain but easy to discover by users. Similarly, if you search for a term, the search results begin with a link to the list of recent changes filtered by the same term. Again, filtering of recent changes is hard to explain but made easy to discover.
– Alex Schroeder 2006-08-09 15:30 UTC
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Ich bin eben dran eine Applikation zu designen und freue mich übern jeden Input. Momentan denke ich, eine gute Applikation sollten
Plus das meiste was JefRaskin sagt 😉
Ich denke es ist extrem schwierig, Applikationen zu designen, die diesen Kriterien genügen, aber die, die es schaffen (z. B. das Web oder Visicalc) haben erstaunlichen Erfolg.
– Chris 2006-08-13 12:58 UTC
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The User Condition: Computer Agency and Behaviour, by Silvio Lorusso.
The User Condition: Computer Agency and Behaviour
– Alex 2021-06-04 21:18 UTC
