Learnability

Learnability revolves around the features of an interactive system that allow novice users to
understand how to use it at first and then how to attain a maximal level of performance.
Learnability makes use of various factor to familiarize a user to a new system:

 Predictability - It makes use of the user past knowledge of interacting with a similar
system to ease the new system interaction. For example the transition from windows
7 to windows 8 had a rough path because of how much the system was changed. The
start button as everyone knows ended up sending the user to the tiles windows
instead of the expected menu. The notion of predictability deals with the user’s ability
to determine the effect of possible interaction to the operations on the system.
Another form of predictability has to do with the user’s ability to know which actions
can be executed.

 Synthesizability - Synthesizability the ability of the user to assess the effect of past
operations on the current state. A user expects to see any important change that is
occurring while he is interacting with the system. For example, when the user makes
 a payment he expects to receive a receipt, otherwise he will think that the transaction
failed or that he is been scammed. The synthesizability relies on the principle of
honesty of the user interface to provide an observable and informative account of
occurring change.

 Familiarity - The principle of familiarity is to make use of the new users past
experience with other applications. This experience can come from real life situation
interaction to interaction with other computer system. For example a danger alert on
any system is red, this immediately warns the user that there is a possible threat
since red is used in everyday life as such.

 Generalization - Generalizability can be seen as a form of consistency. Users often

try to extend their knowledge of specific interaction behavior to situations that are
similar but previously unknown. Generalization can occur within a single application
or across a variety of applications. For example, Microsoft office software menus act
more or less the same way. This concept of generalization is what makes it easy for
people to transition from Microsoft Word to Excel.

 Consistency - Consistency relates to the similarities in behavior arising from alike

situations or alike task objectives. It can be expressed in terms of the form of input
terms or output responses with respect to the meaning of actions in the conceptual of
the system. For example, a user expects a radio button to allow only one choice of
the available options.