Expert ability

You can lead a user to your feature but you cannot make him use it. But if you do, they sometimes will.

posted in: users | 0

Title: User Expertise Stagnates at Low Levels
Context: All those hours you spent building out those new product features? Yeah, you wasted most of them.
Synopsis: ROI. NPV. Benefit deferment. There are times that we sound more like economists than user experience designers, but in a way that’s apt I think. We are (often) designing tools and systems who’s sole intent is to increase productivity, speed efficiency, and/or maximize the use of someone’s time, ergo – as the saying goes – someone else’s money. So who exactly has the time (or money) to spend learning about all those fancy new features you just packed into your latest release? Most users have a set way of working and have constructed an economy of behavior around the tools they use in their current state. Any disruption – to say nothing of “improvement” – does not always equate to improved efficiency. The investment required to discover, explore and master any new feature set might be too steep an expenditure to make without a reciprocative guarantee of cost benefit in return. They say you have to spend money to make money, well, perhaps the new paradigm is the need to spend time to save it…
Best Bit: “[T]he UX team asked customers to nominate new features that they would like to see added to the package. The vast majority of ‘new’ feature requests were for things that had been in Office for years.”

via nngroup.com

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *