Discuss the design of the product: users will use it once they learn it

In discussing the design of the product, the last thing I like to hear is "I admit that the design is not very good, but I think the user will learn it at once."

Do you really want to learn it once? How many times did the baby learn to give the first ' Mom ', how many times did the old man learn to press the mouse? You think that a simple learning will be things, put on the other person is absolutely not guaranteed to set up. I recall having done a usability test in company B six months ago, recording all the errors that occurred when the user was using a software. Afterwards, the data showed that more than half of the users who made the most mistakes were 2 or more times repeating mistakes here and there, one wrong again (and I think PM had the initial decision to do this function with a " The user learns at once will be "mentality bar".

If a user encounters a problem that has been wrong again, it will still go into the gutter, which needs to be considered from two aspects: first, the difficulty of the problem itself, the second is the user's own experience/ability/willingness, which varies from person to person. There is no experience, data, or theory that allows "users to learn it once and for all" is a sophistry. In this world there are countless people in the study after many times still do not own landing QQ, after learning many times still will not enter www.baidu.com, and even after learning many times will not switch their computers.

I think it is a very irresponsible attitude to say "user learns at once" in the discussion, which is negative in giving up the improvement of the product and is absurd to entrust the user with the task of improving the usability of the product. More serious, this kind of subjective conjecture, at the same time coffin conclusive argument, will let a product design discussion fall into the siju, can not go on rationally. (on how to do effective/efficient product design discussion is a great topic, lazy people have Zen may publish a series of articles on this topic, please subscribe to our RSS for attention)

Back to the main topic, so that all functions are sufficient intuitive, users can not learn to use immediately, this is basically impossible to complete the task, but this does not mean that we need to use the "user learning will use the" Ah Q spirit to comfort themselves, paralyzed themselves. Perhaps a more effective way is to allow users to rely on the product (whether it is functional dependence or emotional dependence), facing the loess back to the sky loudly call: "If love you is a mistake, I would rather wrong again."