Discoverability vs. Usability

Resulta que la discoverability se refiere a la habilidad del usuario de descubrir como funciona una interfaz gráfica y a menudo se confunde con la usabilidad, que tiene que ver –a grandes razgos– con que el usuario pueda usar (válgame la redundancia) una interfaz.

Existe un problema derivado de confundir estos dos conceptos: que termines atascando la interfaz con elementos que no pierden su sentido más allá de la fase de descubrimiento. Los chicos de mozilla dan un buen ejemplo: los botones de atrás y adelante en el navegador se cree que están ahí por un motivo de usabilidad, pero en realidad una vez que te vuelves un experto usando el navegador son un desperdicio de pantalla.

me encontre con este interesante video en el cual dos personas en Mozilla discuten la posibilidad de diseñar un browser sin una interfaz de usuario evidente. Con todo lo interesante que suena esa idea, lo que realmente llamó mi atención fue un concepto que yo no conocía: “Discoverability”



The Design Review Episode 2: Chromeless Browsing from Alex Faaborg on Vimeo.

User Experience

la experiencia de usuario lo es todo. Esto significa el hecho de tener en cuenta cada posibilidad de cada acción que el usuario probablemente va a tomar y el entendimiento frente las expectativas en todo momento. Suena como un trabajo grande, y de algun modo lo es.

The Surface Plane
On the surface you see a series of Web pages, made up of images and text. Some of these images are things you can click on, performing some sort of function such as taking you to a shopping cart. Some of these images are just illustrations, such as a photograph of a book cover or the logo of the site itself.

The Skeleton Plane
Beneath that surface is the skeleton of the site: the placement of buttons, tabs, photos, and blocks of text. The skeleton is designed to optimize the arrangement of these elements for maximum effect and efficiency—so that you remember the logo and can find that shopping
cart button when you need it.

The Structure Plane
The skeleton is a concrete expression of the more abstract structure of the site. The skeleton might define the placement of the interface elements on our checkout page; the structure would define how users got to that page and where they could go when they were finished there. The skeleton might define the arrangement of navigational items allowing the users to browse categories of books; the structure would define what those categories actually were.

The Scope Plane
The structure defines the way in which the various features and functions of the site fit together. Just what those features and functions are constitutes the scope of the site. Some sites that sell books offer a feature that enables users to save previously used addresses so they can be used again. The question of whether that feature—or any feature—is included on a site is a question of scope.

The Strategy Plane
The scope is fundamentally determined by the strategy of the site. This strategy incorporates not only what the people running the site want to get out of it but what the users want to get out of the site as well. In the case of our bookstore example, some of the strategic objectives are pretty obvious: Users want to buy books, and we want to sell them. Other objectives might not be so easy to articulate.

Building from Bottom to Top
These five planes—strategy, scope, structure, skeleton, and surface—provide a conceptual framework for talking about user experience problems and the tools we use to solve them.


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