Efficient user interfaces

Question

Speed and learnability do not directly fight each other, but it seems easy enough to design such a GUI that lacks either (or both) of them. GUI designers seem to prefer \'easy t

Answer 1

Have you seen Gimp shortcuts? Use nice visual controls and show keyboard shortcuts for them while hovering control - that will help to learn fast mode. If your software copy some behavior of other programs - copy shortcuts mapping from them (such as Copy/Paste/New Tab/Close Window/etc), but allow to dynamically re-map them as shown in Gimp. For reaped operations you could implement Action recoder. But it depends on type the software.

Answer 2

I would like to point you towards Kathy Sierra's old blog for thoughts on 'easy to learn' and 'fast to apply' — I don't necessarily agree there needs to be a tradeoff between the two.

Three posts to get you started:

1. How much control should users have? This post ponders on whether 'fast to apply' is the ideal we should strive for.
2. The hi-res user experience talks about what you say about "normal people" vs. others. It's not so much that there are different kinds of people, but there are different levels of learning/expertise/involvement. Some are satisfied with less, some need more. How you get from less to more is arguably pretty much the same for everyone.
3. Finally, Featuritis vs. the Happy User Peak talks about the scope creep pointed out by @tinkertim.