Good article Bubba - nice to see a scientific assessment of something so "soft" as usability. However, I believe the test is incorrectly termed a "usability test." There's a lot of literature in the industry regarding usability, but
this Wikipedia entry is a good primer. The test performed by Perceptive Sciences focused almost exclusively on the easier to learn aspects of the devices while ignoring other usability aspects such as utility, task support, extensibility, etc. We can definitely conclude the iPhone has a better "learnability" score than the other two phones, but it seemed like the test was stopped in the middle as the usability topics shifted from "learnability" to other usability factors. I guess that's the problem with subjective testing...it ends up being...subjective.
Good article Bubba - nice to see a scientific assessment of something so "soft" as usability. However, I believe the test is incorrectly termed a "usability test." There's a lot of literature in the industry regarding usability, but this Wikipedia entry is a good primer. The test performed by Perceptive Sciences focused almost exclusively on the easier to learn aspects of the devices while ignoring other usability aspects such as utility, task support, extensibility, etc. We can definitely conclude the iPhone has a better "learnability" score than the other two phones, but it seemed like the test was stopped in the middle as the usability topics shifted from "learnability" to other usability factors. I guess that's the problem with subjective testing...it ends up being...subjective.
