{"id":121,"date":"2002-02-04T11:38:43","date_gmt":"2002-02-04T11:38:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sunpig.com\/mt-entry-121.html"},"modified":"2006-09-23T19:30:11","modified_gmt":"2006-09-23T19:30:11","slug":"lies-damn-lies-and-usability-metrics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/2002\/02\/04\/lies-damn-lies-and-usability-metrics\/","title":{"rendered":"Lies, damn lies, and usability metrics"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I like Jakob Nielsen.  I like his drive and passion for great usability.  But he does produce some severely dodgy statistics from time to time.  This week, in his <a href=\"http:\/\/www.useit.com\/alertbox\/20020203.html\" alt=\"Jakob Nielsen's alertbox: Avoiding Commodity Status\">Alertbox<\/a> column, he headlines with the quote:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\n&#8220;Software has great potential for getting better, as shown by an under-appreciated feature in Windows XP that can save users $2,000 per year.&#8221;\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>In the article he explains how he gets at this figure.  I won&#8217;t duplicate the calculation here, but the heart of it is the assertion that a 10% increase in reading speed (by using <a href=\"http:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/typography\/cleartype\/default.htm\" alt=\"Microsoft's Cleartype technology\">Cleartype<\/a>) results in a 10% increase in productivity.<\/p>\n<p>Sorry Jakob; doesn&#8217;t follow.  A 10% increase in reading speed means that you&#8217;ve got 10% more time to spend nattering with your colleagues over coffee.<\/p>\n<p>A <i>50%<\/i> increase in reading speed, now that would be useful.  But I doubt very much if the <i>productivity gain<\/i> would be anywhere near that.  Probably closer to 10-20%.  The main reason for this is that hardly anyone spends all their time reading continuously.  Most of the time you read a short chunk, then do something else.  And the time it takes to go from reading to something else will swallow up 10% with ease.  Joel Spolsky writes about exactly this in his <a href=\"\" alt=\"Joel on software: Human task switches considered harmful\">article on task switching<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I like Jakob Nielsen.  I like his drive and passion for great usability.  But he does produce some severely dodgy statistics from time to time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-121","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-user_experience"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/121","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=121"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/121\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=121"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=121"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=121"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}