How to Measure Learnability of a User Interface

To measure learnability, determine your metric, gather your data, and plot the averages on a line curve. Analyze the learning curve by looking at its slope and its plateau.

Summary: To measure learnability, determine your metric, gather your data, and plot the averages on a line curve. Analyze the learning curve by looking at its slope and its plateau.

What Is Learnability?

Learnability is one of the five quality components of usability (the others being efficiency, memorability, errors, and satisfaction). Testing learnability is especially valuable for complex applications and systems that users access frequently, though knowing how quickly users can acclimate to your interface is valuable for even objectively simple systems.

Learnability considers how easy it is for users to accomplish a task the first time they encounter the interface and how many repetitions it takes for them to become efficient at that task.

In a learnability study, we want to produce a learning curve , which reveals longitudinal changes of a quantified aspect of human behavior. With the data from the learning curve, we can identify how long it takes users to reach saturation — a plateau in our charted data which tells us that users have learned the interface as much as possible.