Something to Try: Two types of Feed URLs

More on Tryability: It’s an Attention Thing

Sometimes we spend a lot of time and effort doing various things that we don’t want to be doing because they just have to be done:

Between yesterday and today I’ve spent 5 hours trying to get my wireless network working with the VoIP box
Between yesterday and today I’ve spent 3 hours doing various things with my car, taking it to the shop, calling about it, explaining how bad it is driving recently, etc.
Recently I spent 8 hours trying to get rid of viruses on an old windows box at home. So frustrated, I gave up and asked Jason from work to do it, promising him a share of the money I make on it when I sell it on eBay

Sometimes we refuse to spend a lot of time because they just don’t have to be done:

Trying out new things when we have a decent one to begin with
Taking the time to install new software that we’re not sure is useful yet
Taking the time to learn something new when doing it the old way takes x amount of time
Doing something the old way after we’ve learned the new way
Seriously considering a new idea when it potentially conflicts with our established thoughts

Tryability is a new term I made up to represent the pain of trying something new. In a similar way that “usability” is a measurement of how usable something is, “tryability” is a measurement of the effort involved of trying something new. It is made up of several factors:

learnability: how easy is it to use for the first time? (or learn new features)
usability: how easy is it to use over time (includes learnability)
effort: the time and energy involved in trying it out
attention: the attention it takes to find and learn about it (as opposed to learning to use it)

These things all overlap, of course. The reason why I’m using the new term “tryability” is that it involves an attention factor…things get much harder when there are other things to attend to. In other words, we have to make an effort to divert our attention to try something. We could probably house this under “usability”, but usability testing is often conducted in controlled situations…which don’t include fractured attention.

For web applications tryability is crucial because tools are making it so easy to post information online. How many ways are there to make a web page? A million?

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Comments

1. len 12:42pm, Sat 23rd, 2005

I think that we can get a lot more people trying things that do not need to be installed because it is web based software. On the other hand, we don’t have full blown suites that can cover everything. Webbased apps are very specific.

The problem that you are giving a name is more or less the “paradox of the active user”.

The “paradox of the active user” is a paradox because users would save time in the long term by taking some initial time to optimize the system and learn more about it.
(http://www.useit.com/alertbox/activeuserparadox.html)

People dont save time installing / uninstalling software, that is true. But using specific web based apps will get you stuck in the end cause it is probably not up to the job or doesn’t have all the feature you find in desktop apps.

2. Bernie Dodge 3:49am, Sun 24th, 2005

Is this different from “trialability”, one of the core concepts in diffusion of innovation theory?

3. voip phone 10:26pm, Thu 8th, 2007

fanvil leading the voip industry

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