Usability and timing

Very interesting item on Surf*Mind*Musings this morning. Something I had never thought about in usability before, and I never would have imagined there'd be a way to really quantify it. It's not just about minimizing the number of steps it takes to do something - it's how long each of those steps takes.

An example from my project at work, worst case: point, click, go to pop-up window, point, select from a drop-down, click OK, point, select from a multi-select box, click OK...there's more but it's getting tedious now. But I'm not sure the task can be distilled down to fewer steps. There's a lot going on there. Perhaps if we'd defined what needs to be done before talking about how it would be done, we could have done better.