Re: [Usability] Ellipsis on buttons

[Calum Benson <Calum Benson Sun COM>]

On 24 Mar 2006, at 20:20, Shaun McCance wrote:

> As a mathematician, I've found the stated results of nearly
> every usability test I've ever seen to be very suspect.  They
> test for something and establish it, and that's all well and
> good, but people then tend to ignore the use-cases that were
> controlled out of the experiment and overstate the results.
>
> In particular, I constantly see people making their design
> decisions based on usability tests which test discoverability.
> I'm not saying discoverability is bad, but it's an entirely
> different thing than, say, the efficiency of a user who is
> already *moderately* (not even expertly) familiar with the
> interface.  Tests for that sort of thing seem to be few and
> far between, while tests on complete newbies are a dime a
> dozen.

One reason for this, I would guess, is that most of that sort of  
testing happens internally on products whose usability tests aren't  
opened up to public scrutiny.  Any well-managed commercial  
development cycle will involve several iterations of usability  
testing involving the users who helped them design the interface in  
the first place, so the effects of familiarity over learnability come  
into play.  (And all those studies will be devised with the input of,  
and the results analysed by, the statistician.)

I guess this is one of the next steps in the evolution of open source  
usability, but I'm not convinced we really do step one well enough  
yet (the first round of task analysis/requirements gathering and  
initial prototyping/feedback with representative users).

Cheeri,
Calum.

--
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum benson sun com            Java Desktop System Team
http://blogs.sun.com/calum             +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems