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Learnability

The document discusses principles that support learnability in interactive systems, including predictability, synthesizability, familiarity, generalizability, and consistency. These principles concern a user's ability to understand a new system based on their past experiences and knowledge and how the system provides feedback about its internal state and responses.

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19 views

Learnability

The document discusses principles that support learnability in interactive systems, including predictability, synthesizability, familiarity, generalizability, and consistency. These principles concern a user's ability to understand a new system based on their past experiences and knowledge and how the system provides feedback about its internal state and responses.

Uploaded by

tjames445
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as DOC, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Learnability

Learnability concerns the features of the interactive system that allows novice users to
understand how to use it initially and then how to attain a maximal level of performance. The
specific principles that support learnability are:

 Predictability

This means that the user’s knowledge of the interaction history is sufficient to
determine the result of his future interaction with it. There are many degrees to which
predictability can be satisfied. The knowledge can be restricted to the presently
perceivable information, so that the user need not remember anything other than what
is currently observable. The knowledge requirement can be increased to the limit
where the user is actually forced to remember what every precious keystroke was and
what every previous screen display contained (and the order of each) in order to
determine the consequences of the next input action.

 Synthesizability

This provides support for the user to assess the effect of past operations on the current
state. When an operation changes some aspect of the internal state, it is important that
the change is seen by the user. The principle relates to the ability of the user interface
to provide an observable and informative account of such change. In the best of
circumstances, this notification can come immediately, requiring no further interaction
initiated by the user. Or at the very least, the notification should appear eventually,
after explicit user directives to make the change observable. The problem with this
principle (eventual honesty) is that the user must know to look for the change. In a
situation in which the user is learning a new interactive system, it is likely that a user
will not know to look for change.

 Familiarity

This is the extent to which a user’s knowledge and experience in other real world or
computer-based domains can be applied when interacting with a new system.
New users of a system bring with them a wealth of experience across a wide number
of application domains. The experience is obtained both through interactions in the
real world and also through interaction with other computer systems. For a new user,
the familiarity of an interactive system measures the correlation between the user’s
existing knowledge and the knowledge required for effective interaction. Familiarity
has to do with a user’s first impression of the system; therefore, what must be
considered is how the system is first perceived and whether the user can determine
how to initiate any interaction.

 Generalizability

This is support for the user to extend knowledge of specific interaction within and
across applications to other similar situations. Users often try to extend their
knowledge of specific interaction behaviour to situations which are similar but not
previously encountered. The Generalizability of an interactive system supports this
activity, leading to a more complete predictive model of the system for the user.
Generalization can be applied to situations in which the user wants to apply
knowledge which helps achieve a particular goal, to another situation in which the
goal is in some way similar.

 Consistency

Consistency relates to the likeness in behaviour arising from similar situations or


similar task objectives. The user relies on a consistent interface. However, the
difficulty of dealing with consistency is that it can take many forms. Consistency is
not a single property of an interactive system that is either satisfied or not satisfied.
Instead, it must be applied relative to something.

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