Learnability Isn’t Enough: Designing Easy-To-Use Apps with Ui Ergonomics

Many Usability issues with digital products and user interfaces (UI) only get noticed and fixed after users have had a chance to spend some time with them. Unfortunately, this approach relies on painful experiences being reported by users, which can allow smaller annoyances to linger -- while bigger issues can be truly disastrous.

Learnability Isn’t Enough will show you a new method for catching many of these types of issues ahead of time, so that user pain can be minimized. You’ll learn how to do this by making an uncommon distinction between two different types of effort needed when using an interface: learning effort and ergonomic effort.

Ultimately, the tools and techniques in this book allow you to spare users from pain they might otherwise be faced with, while making optimizations during the design process that save your team time and effort. It’s a shortcut to designing products that aren’t just easy to learn, but are easy to use every day.

You Will Learn to:

• Narrow in on issues that often aren’t noticed right away
• Keep users happy while making substantial changes to interfaces
• Spot key design improvements and make wiser decisions on where to focus your efforts

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
  

Hans van de Bruggen has been designing digital interfaces since the age of 12 and has been obsessed with digital design ever since building a website that helped turn the fortune of his family’s business around. In the 25 years since, he has led design teams building digital tools for hospitals, software engineers, Hollywood execs, call centers, and industry giants like Netflix and LinkedIn. He has previously written for many world renowned publications, including TechCrunch, Engadget, The Verge, Wired, PCMag, Variety and Esquire.

A few years ago, whilst working on software apps and frameworks for nurses and physicians, van de Bruggen saw the need for fast, easy to use digital tools when he saw the following saying on a stroke ward: ＂time is brain＂. To these users, the top speed at which they could use their tools was of much higher importance than the time it took to learn them. he soon realized there was a whole class of users with this need, and after developing the strategies used in this book, found that they dramatically reduced the need to make changes once the software was released. These techniques made for software that was better in version 1.0, meant less time was spent building the wrong thing, less was spent redesigning and rebuilding, and less of the user’s time was spent waiting for the product to be as good as they needed it to be and needed to share these finding