Background

As people use a product for extended periods of time, their understanding of it and its place in their environment changes. The exact nature of these changes in perspective varies with the person, the product, and what they're doing with it. A home office user looking through an office supplies site for a replacement toner cartridge is going to have a different perspective on the content of the site than the office manager who is continually purchasing products there. Although the office manager probably started with a perspective much like the home user, his or her long-term use of it is profoundly different.

During the progression from newbie to expert, several things happen.

• Mistakes are made. Many (probably most) people learn software products by puttering around. They guess at functionality and features. Sometimes they're right. Often, they're not. These mistakes are informative and frequent. As people learn, they make different kinds of mistakes.

• Mental models are built. Products are black boxes. As people learn to use them, they create models of how the boxes operate so that they can predict what the boxes will do in unexpected situations and how they can make the boxes do what they want.

• Expectations are set. As familiarity grows, people learn to anticipate the experience the product provides. Certain areas of the screen are expected to have certain kinds of content. Situations are expected to follow a particular pattern.

• Habits are formed. People get used to doing things in a certain way. They find patterns of commands that work even if they're inefficient or not how the product is ideally supposed to function.

• Opinions are created. Products are rarely accepted or rejected outright by people who have used them. Some parts they like; others they don't. Sometimes, things that seem confusing or unnecessary at the beginning become elegant and useful as experience grows. At other times, minor irritation builds into outright hatred for a feature or subsystem.

• A context is developed. The relationship that a product takes to its users' goals, job, and the other tools they use changes with time. Some products become indispensable; others are marginalized.

Note

All these effects happen in the context of people's entire experience. As they use various similar products, these kinds of knowledge develop for the whole class of products, not just yours. Systemwide effects are difficult to track and even more difficult to compensate for, but they are no less important than people's experiences with a single product.

All these changes affect the user experience of the product and are difficult to capture and understand in a systematic way unless you track their progress.