Handbook of Usability Testing: How to Plan, Design, and Conduct Effective Tests
Handbook of Usability Testing: How to Plan, Design, and Conduct Effective Tests
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In developing software for creative professionals, one goal is to enable new users to learn to use the product well. In this paper, we describe a study comparing how novices and experts use Adobe Photoshop. When asked to perform specific tasks in Photoshop, we found that, contrary to our expectations, the expert users often took longer at the tasks than the novices. While most usability practitioners assert that when users take a short time to perform a task, an application is more usable, when they take longer, it is less usable [4], based on our study's results, we posit that this is not always true. We posit that professional designers undertaking a creative task, are less aware or time, as in a flow state [1, 2, 3] and thus can take longer to perform tasks than novices. Furthermore, we found that rather than explore the interface for new features to complete a task, expert users frequently use slower, but more familiar, approaches.