Learnability Isn't Enough: Designing Easy-to-Use Apps with UI Ergonomics Hans van de Bruggen Author

Explore the concept of UI Ergonomics - the day-to-day speed and comfort of a software tool. This book will show you how to build apps better suited to users’ needs using the concepts of Usability, Learnability, and UI Ergonomics. You’ll start by reviewing what makes a piece of software ergonomic through a set of design principles. These principles are ergonomic apps that are Clear, Unobstructed, Predictable, Indulgent, and Digestible (CUPID) and adhere to the Law of UI Ergonomics: What a user needs to do next cannot happen until they are able to do it.” While simple on the surface, these principles have many ramifications ranging from cognition, to motor skills, anticipation, app responsiveness, fatigue, and more. In short, you’ll need to identify the primary sources of friction users encounter in your app. For example, using a software tool versus the difficulty of learning it. This book will show you how to design and build apps better suited to users’ needs by breaking usability into learnability and ergonomics By doing so, you’ll be better able to prioritize design improvements and create tools that go beyond simply being easy to pick up, to being easy to live with. This is a topic that has grown in importance in recent years, as we now “live in our apps”. This sits in contrast to the world of recent decades, where much of design thinking centered around software being easy to “pick up and play with”. That emphasis on ’learnability ensured that interfaces — many of them being websites that shared usability needs with that of a mall kiosk — helped users in a time when many were new to computers entirely. Now, smartphones are more popular than ever, and the amount of time a typical user spends inside a familiar interface (in both work and play) has skyrocketed. Learnability isn’t Enough pieces all of this together and explains how the effort of using an app again and again has become more important than the effort of using it the first time. What You’ll Learn • Prioritize design improvements with new tools for evaluating the usability of apps using ergonomic design principles • Improve your apps by finding and fixing the primary sources of ergonomic friction • Propose ergonomic design improvements for management teams that may be skeptical of their value and impact • Use techniques for comparing your apps to that of your competitors on the basis of design • Validate software ergonomics through novel usability testing techniques Who This Book Is For • Product designers, interaction designers, UX designers, UI designers, and design researchers, etc. • Industry-like product managers, developers and other business managers who have an interest in product strategy and software design. • Software and product design students, and early career designers