[Sigia-l] Forcing practice

[Whitney Quesenbery]

At 10:38 AM 9/29/2003 -0500, Mike.Steckel at sematech.org wrote:
>Are you SURE you have to force them through a learning process? I also 
>work with an extremely complex site and this would be strongly resented 
>and people would probably just click through it as fast as they could.


I agree with the comments about forcing someone through a learning process.

However, if you made the tutorial useful, it might be well received. Can 
you create something that actually captures some of the critical 
information and drops it into the application at the right places. If you 
could isolate the most common or serious errors, you could solve a lot of 
problems by essentially creating an alternate universe to the unusable 
application.

We once created a wizard to walk through a complex app, and found that 
almost no one used the application - because the wizard was so much 
easier....even though it was more screens and more steps. Effectiveness and 
Ease of Learning trumped (false) Efficiency in this case.

Or, create a cheat sheet that points out the most common problems - could 
be something that is distributed on paper, but is really a small on-screen 
image that sits next to the application.

Is the business process complicated, or is the application complicated? Is 
this one of those cases where the app's "mental model" makes a difficult 
task worse?

And, question the concept that you can't change the application. Unless you 
absolutely know what the problems are and where the errors occur, you may 
need to do a little usability testing to understand why people have trouble 
with the app. Think about what it will cost to create your training wheels, 
vs. what it would cost/benefit to fix the real problem.



Whitney Quesenbery
Whitney Interactive Design, LLC
w. www.WQusability.com
e. whitneyq at wqusability.com
p. 908-638-5467

UPA  - www.usabilityprofessionals.org
STC Usability SIG: www.stcsig.org/usability