Re:New year, same old plans
by munificent on Wednesday April 03, 2019 @03:29PM
(#19566433)
That's true, but with UX, there are sometimes trade-offs to make around discoverability and productivity.
A more discoverable UI may take a greater number of steps to perform. If the application is used rarely or briefly, that's a good trade-off. But if an application will be heavily used by a user who is incentivized to learn the tool, then their total productivity matters more since it amortizes over the lifetime of their use with the tool.
Text editors definitely fall into the "heavily used" bucket, so a good user experience might mean "you gotta read the manual, but once you do you can go 10x faster".
A more discoverable UI may take a greater number of steps to perform. If the application is used rarely or briefly, that's a good trade-off. But if an application will be heavily used by a user who is incentivized to learn the tool, then their total productivity matters more since it amortizes over the lifetime of their use with the tool.
Text editors definitely fall into the "heavily used" bucket, so a good user experience might mean "you gotta read the manual, but once you do you can go 10x faster".