December 2015
Beginner
255 pages
4h 54m
English
Content preview from UX for BeginnersBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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Chapter 71. What Is Usability, Really?
Your design will affect how much the user must think to get the job done. If you made a scale that goes from “no thinking” to “thinking hard,” that would be a usability scale.
One of the most common myths in UX is that good usability is more pleasing to the eye.
It is impossible for something to “look usable.” If someone says that about your design, ignore it.
When users are surveyed about which design is “most usable,” their opinions are more related to the beauty than the effectiveness. This means we can’t trust user opinions about how usable a design is.
Usability is measured by what people do:
If more people buy something in an uglier design, it is more usable.
If people read more in an uglier design, it is more usable.
If more people register via the uglier design, it is more usable.
Sometimes you will be forced to choose between beauty and usability. Always choose usability.
Usability = Cognitive Load
Cognitive load is the amount of processing power that is required to complete any little thing we make a user’s brain do. For example:
It takes less work to continue what you’re doing than to do something different.
It takes less work to find something again than it did to find it the first time.
It takes less work to read simple words than to read complicated words.
It takes less work to agree than it does to complain.
Every detail in your design (and in your life) should reduce the amount of cognitive load between the user (or yourself) and positive ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.