User Productivity

Recently, Apple sponsored a study that found large computer monitors (particularly the 30-inch Apple Cinema Display) increased user productivity by 50%-60%. In response to the press that this study is getting, Jakob Nielsen criticizes the study’s methodology and findings saying that “it didn’t test realistic tasks, and it didn’t test realistic use.”

The take away for me from reading this article is not whether I should get a bigger monitor, but just the thought that productivity is a key aspect in evaluating usability. Specifically, productivity should be a theme that penetrates usability tests not just for the workplace, but also for websites or any piece of web communication.
In the article, Nielsen argues that productivity should be evaluated by looking at “operations� (“Was the user able to compute his taxes?�) rather than “tasks� (“Did he enter the information in less time?) which is supposedly what the Apple researchers did.

So in application, I think the ideal that everything is “one click away� is challenged at this point. If everything is a click away, that’s almost like receiving the phone book in a scroll rather than in regular binding. Thinking that we can be more productive on a website by shaving off the number of steps to an action is an incomplete strategy. The strategy needs to be balanced by the creation of simple paths to the action that allows the users to accomplish their goal, whether takes them 20 seconds or one minute.