What makes a tool well designed? As a designer, I’ve thought about this question for a long time, and over the past few years I’ve developed a system that I now use with every new project I approach, from small startups to large companies like LinkedIn and Netflix. I find it helps clarify which features to prioritize and gives novel insights about a product’s strengths and weaknesses. This has been surprisingly valuable to me, and I believe this has real value for other Designers, Product Managers, and Design Researchers, too.

是什么使工具设计得当？ 作为一名设计师，我已经思考了很长时间，在过去的几年中，我已经开发了一种系统，现在可以将其用于我所处理的每个新项目，从小型创业公司到大型公司，如LinkedIn和Netflix。 我发现它有助于阐明应优先考虑的功能，并提供有关产品优缺点的新颖见解。 这对我来说是非常有价值的，而且我相信这对于其他设计师，产品经理和设计研究人员也具有真正的价值。

I know you’re busy! This is Part 1 of a series of articles where I’ll dive into various ways this system can be applied. Each article will take less than 10 minutes to read.

我知道你很忙！ 这是系列文章的第1部分，我将深入探讨该系统的各种应用方式。 每篇文章的阅读时间都少于10分钟。

So stay tuned! For now, let’s kick things off with an introduction.

敬请期待！ 现在，让我们从介绍开始。

向Vim学习 (Learning from Vim)

As a designer, I find Vim very interesting.

作为设计师，我发现Vim 非常有趣。

If you’re not already familiar, Vim is a text editor that’s somewhat infamous in the world of software development. It’s been around for nearly 30 years and has a reputation for being horrendously difficult at first.

如果您还不熟悉，Vim是一个文本编辑器，在软件开发领域中它是臭名昭著的。 它已经存在了将近30年，并以一开始的巨大难度而闻名。

As a text editor, Vim is unusual. You’ll see a blinking cursor, but typing doesn’t input text like you’d expect. Your cursor may start jumping, and whole lines of text may start disappearing. On first run, your mouse doesn’t even work — there are no toolbars or menus!

作为文本编辑器，Vim不寻常。 您会看到一个闪烁的光标，但是键入并没有输入您期望的文本。 您的光标可能开始跳动，整行文本可能开始消失。 首次运行时，您的鼠标甚至不起作用-没有工具栏或菜单！

In fact, it’s so confusing that at the time of writing, the Stack Overflow page “How do I exit the Vim editor?” ranks as the 86th most viewed question out of over 18 million questions. According to them, “during peak traffic hours on weekdays, there are about 80 people per hour that need help getting out of Vim.”

实际上，它是如此令人困惑，以至于在撰写本文时，“堆栈溢出”页面“ 如何退出Vim编辑器？ 在超过1800万个问题中 ，第86最受欢迎的问题 。 他们说 ，“在工作日的高峰时段，每小时大约有80个人需要离开Vim的帮助。”

Vim is famous for being extremely frustrating the first few times you encounter it, because there is no obvious way to use the text editor for editing text. So it might come as some surprise that Vim is considered to be one of the absolute best text editors on the planet by many, boasting an army of passionate supporters. In fact, when you watch Vim being used by someone who knows it well, it’s incredible. It’s like watching a ballet performance — fluid, unencumbered. Graceful, even!

Vim因在遇到它的前几次感到非常沮丧而闻名，因为没有明显的方法可以使用文本编辑器来编辑文本。 因此，令人惊讶的是，Vim拥有一支热情的支持者军队，被许多人视为地球上绝对最佳的文本编辑器之一。 实际上，当您看到Vim被非常了解它的人使用时，这是不可思议的。 就像观看芭蕾舞表演一样—流畅，不受阻碍。 优雅，甚至！

(If you’ve never seen someone use Vim before, watch this 34 second clip. Don’t worry about the code itself—just notice how smoothly he navigates without ever taking his hands off the keyboard. Bear in mind, this is just the tip of the Vim-berg, as it’s an incredibly flexible tool.)

(如果您以前从未见过有人使用过Vim，请观看这34秒的剪辑 。不必担心代码本身—只需注意他导航的平稳程度，而无需将手从键盘上移开即可。请记住，这只是Vim-berg的尖端，因为它是一种非常灵活的工具。)

People who regularly use Vim tend to love Vim. They are often very vocal in their support for it, raving about how the tool “gets out of the way” so that they can “code at the speed of thought”. There are massive nerdwars pitting Vim against other editors, with staunch supporters even calling Vim a “way of life”.

经常使用Vim的人倾向于爱 Vim。 他们经常对此表示支持，他们热衷于该工具如何“摆脱干扰”，以便他们可以“以思考的速度进行编码”。 有大量的书呆子使Vim与其他编辑竞争，坚定的支持者甚至称Vim为“ 生活方式 ”。

Yet if you took this to user testing, it would likely fail immediately.

但是，如果将其用于用户测试，则可能会立即失败。

So now, the question: Is Vim well designed?

现在，问题来了： Vim是否设计合理？

Well, how do we usually decide if a product we’re building is “well-designed”? We’ve all taken products to user testing for validation, and we like to listen for phrases like “user-friendly”, “usable”, “easy”, or “simple”. We often ask “does this do what the user needs it to?”

那么，我们通常如何确定我们正在构建的产品是否“设计合理”？ 我们都将产品带到用户测试中进行验证，我们喜欢听“用户友好”，“可用”，“简单”或“简单”之类的短语。 我们经常问：“这是用户需要的吗？”

To give this some basic language, we can call that last part Capability, as in “is it capable of performing the task the user needs it to perform?” Then, we have what we usually call Usability, as in “how easy is it to use this?”

为了提供一些基本语言，我们可以将最后一部分称为Capability ，例如“它是否能够执行用户需要执行的任务？” 然后，我们有了通常所说的可用性 ，例如“ 使用它有多容易？”

Unfortunately, “Usability” doesn’t tell the whole story. We know that Vim is certainly “capable” of producing files containing code. But “Usability” doesn’t give us enough detail here. Is Vim actually “usable”?

不幸的是，“可用性”并不能说明全部。 我们知道Vim当然可以“产生”包含代码的文件。 但是“可用性”在这里没有给我们足够的细节。 Vim真的“ 可用 ”吗？

On one hand, Vim is next to impossible to use the first time you see it. On the other, it’s beautifully fluid once you’ve learned it.

一方面，Vim在您第一次看到它时几乎无法使用。 另一方面，一旦您学会了它，它就会变得很漂亮。

Instead, we can break Usability into two pieces I call Learnability and Ergonomics:

相反，我们可以将可用性分为两部分，分别称为学习性和人机工程学 ：

“Learnability” is a measure of how easy it is to learn a thing. This relates to the “learning curve” we often talk about.

“可学习性”是学习事物的难易程度的度量。 这与我们经常谈论的“学习曲线”有关。

“Ergonomics”, then, is a measure of how easy it is to use something once it has been learned.

因此，“人机工程学”衡量了使用某种东西有多容易 一旦学会了 。

In my view, Vim is poorly designed for Learnability, but fantastically designed for Ergonomics.

在我看来，Vim的学习能力设计很差，但为人体工程学设计的却非常出色 。

Now, why do I call this “Ergonomic”?

现在，为什么我称其为“人体工程学”？

The Oxford English Dictionary defines “ergonomic” as “relating to or designed for efficiency and comfort in the working environment”. These two things — efficiency and comfort — are things we seldom measure explicitly when trying to determine whether we’ve designed something well. (If we wanted to, would we even know how?)

牛津英语词典将“人机工程学”定义为“与工作环境中的效率和舒适有关或设计为与之相关”。 效率和舒适度这两件事是我们在试图确定我们是否设计得很好时很少明确衡量的事情。 (如果我们愿意，我们甚至会知道吗？)

Throughout this article series, I’ll be referring to “products” where I mean any sort of digital tool, with special attention given to (but not limited to) tools used by professionals. I’ll also be giving special attention to UI Ergonomics and the interplay it has with Learnability and Capability. In my opinion, this does not get nearly enough attention relative to how valuable it is.

在本系列文章中，我将指的是“产品”，指的是任何种类的数字工具，尤其要注意(但不限于)专业人员使用的工具。 我还将特别关注UI人机工程学及其与可学习性和功能性之间的相互作用。 在我看来，这并不相对于它是多么宝贵的近足够的重视得到。

So, to put it another way, you can think of the “Capability” of a tool as the results that can be achieved, “Learnability” as how quickly a user can get up to speed, and “Ergonomics” as how quickly & smoothly a user can go at full speed.

因此，换句话说，您可以将工具的“功能”视为 可以实现的结果 ，“学习能力”为 用户能多快上手 ，以及“人体工程学” 用户全速前进的速度和流畅程度 。

Breaking apart “Usability” into buckets for “those who are learning” and “those who already know how” can give us an interesting set of tools both for improving a product and seeing how it compares to other products. In other words, understanding how to leverage both Learnability and Ergonomics can be a competitive advantage. Let’s take a look an an example!

将“可用性”划分为“正在学习的人”和“已经知道如何做”的用户群，可以为我们提供一组有趣的工具，既可以改进产品，又可以查看产品与其他产品的比较。 换句话说，了解如何同时利用可学习性和人机工程学可以是一项竞争优势 。 让我们来看一个例子！

赢得人机工程学 (Winning with Ergonomics)

Here, we’ll do a sort of Interaction Cost analysis, where we break down a task into a set of interactions to measure how ergonomic a workflow is. Let’s take a look at a couple desktop publishing tools and go through a workflow with a few common steps — we’ll be drawing a text box, pasting text into it, repositioning elements, and editing text.

在这里，我们将进行一种“ 交互成本”分析 ，在该分析中 ，我们将一个任务分解为一组交互，以衡量工作流程的人体工程学水平。 让我们看一下几个桌面发布工具，并通过几个常规步骤来完成工作流程-我们将绘制一个文本框，将文本粘贴到其中，重新放置元素并编辑文本。

For the sake of example, we’ll be looking at some older tools for this process. Don’t worry if you aren’t familiar with these tools yourself. All you need to know is that both tools can perform the same task. We’ll be walking through the process in each tool step-by-step with a full breakdown at the end.

举例来说，我们将研究一些较旧的工具来完成此过程。 如果您自己不熟悉这些工具，请不要担心 。 您需要知道的是，这两个工具都可以执行相同的任务。 我们将逐步介绍每个工具的过程，并在最后进行完整的分解。

To start, let’s look at QuarkXpress 5.0. Below, a knowledgeable user goes through the fastest process in QuarkXPress:

首先，让我们看一下QuarkXpress 5.0。 下面，知识渊博的用户在QuarkXPress中经历了最快的过程：

Now, let’s look at that same process in Adobe InDesign CS. Once again, we’re looking at this through the eyes of someone who knows it well:

现在，让我们看看Adobe InDesign CS中的相同过程。 再一次，我们通过一个非常了解它的人的眼光来看待这个问题：

Here’s a breakdown of those two flows:

这是这两个流程的分解：

It’s worth noting — a user could go through the exact same workflow in InDesign as QuarkXPress by clicking the comparable tool for each step. As a result, the baseline Learnability of this flow is no different between the two. But InDesign has a few important ergonomic improvements QuarkXPress doesn’t have.

值得注意的是，用户可以通过在每个步骤中单击可比较的工具，在InDesign中与QuarkXPress进行完全相同的工作流程 。 结果，这两个流程之间的基线可学习性相同。 但是InDesign具有QuarkXPress没有的一些重要的人体工程学改进。

Specifically, this workflow in QuarkXPress requires a number of “fiddly” clicks (steps 1, 4, and 7), which has users moving back and forth to click on a tiny icons in the tool box again and again. But InDesign gives users more ergonomic ways of creating text boxes, repositioning, and placing their text cursor — all of which are common tasks! — which removes the friction of repeated mouse moves away from their work and the need for precise interactions with tiny controls. As a result, this workflow is far more ergonomic in InDesign than in QuarkXPress.

特别是，QuarkXPress中的此工作流程需要多次“轻率地”单击(步骤1、4和7)，使用户来回移动以一次又一次地单击工具箱中的小图标。 但是InDesign为用户提供了更符合人体工程学的方式来创建文本框，重新定位和放置其文本光标-所有这些都是常见的任务！ -消除了重复的鼠标移动带来的摩擦，摆脱了工作，并消除了与微小控件进行精确交互的需要。 结果， 在InDesign中此工作流程比在QuarkXPress中更符合人体工程学 。

I want to stress that it’s not simply a matter of the results each tool could get, as both tools are equally capable of performing this task. And it’s not about the upfront pain of learning how to achieve these results. It’s about the amount of required friction in a known process, as that friction is felt during every use.

我想强调的是，这不仅仅是每个工具都能获得的结果，因为这两个工具都具有执行此任务的能力。 这与学习如何获得这些结果的前期痛苦无关。 这是在已知过程中所需的摩擦量，因为在每次使用时都会感觉到这种摩擦。

In other words, it’s not better because of Capability or Learnability, but because of Ergonomics. And as we’ll see next, this mattered to users.

换句话说，并不是因为能力或可学习性而是因为人体工程学。 正如我们接下来将要看到的，这对用户很重要。

一个警示故事 (A cautionary tale)

Here’s a quote from Denise Williams (@lettergrade), who regularly worked with QuarkXPress and was being given a demo of InDesign:

这是Denise Williams ( @lettergrade )的报价 ，他经常与QuarkXPress合作，并收到InDesign的演示：

“We all actually got emotional. The room was nuts. The Quark reps were humiliated. It was so obvious that all this stuff was going to take the friction out of our departments, which sometimes moved up to 200 ads a day. I remember this PM from Brooklyn sitting beside me who grabbed my arm partway through the demo, and we actually held each other while we listened. CRAZY.”

“ 我们实际上都情绪激动 。 房间很坚果。 夸克代表被羞辱了。 显而易见，所有这些东西都将使我们各部门之间的纠缠消失，有时每天会增加200个广告 。 我记得布鲁克林的一位总理坐在我旁边，他在演示过程中抓住了我的手臂，在聆听的过程中我们实际上是互相抱着的。 疯。”

And this is from Dave Girard, writing in the same article for Ars Technica:

这是戴夫·吉拉德 ( Dave Girard )在同一篇文章中为Ars Technica撰写的：

“The widely reported statistics were that XPress enjoyed 95 percent dominance of the publishing market [in the 90s, before InDesign…] But things swiftly changed, and by 2004, Quark’s market share reportedly declined to 25 percent. That is what we in the publishing biz refer to as ‘totally insane.’”

“被广泛报道的统计数据表明，XPress在90年代(在InDesign之前……)就占据了出版市场95％的统治地位 ，但是情况很快发生了变化，到2004年，夸克的市场份额据称下降到25％ 。 这就是我们在出版业务中所说的“完全疯狂”。”

People left Quark for InDesign in droves shortly after it launched. There were certainly other factors that contributed to people making the switch, but I believe Ergonomics played a central role. The daily pain people felt made it much easier for them to make the switch to a competing product.

推出后不久，人们就大批离开Quark进入InDesign。 当然，还有其他因素促使人们做出了转变，但是我相信人体工程学起着核心作用。 人们每天的痛苦使他们更容易转向竞争产品。

结论 (In conclusion)

• Better UI Ergonomics can be the deciding factor in a user choosing one product over another, so understanding what it is and how to improve it may be key to your product’s success.

  更好的UI人体工程学可以成为用户选择一种产品而不是另一种产品的决定因素，因此了解产品的本质以及如何改进它可能是产品成功的关键。

• Top-notch Ergonomics not only gives people a reason to switch to your tool, it also gives them a reason to stay with it—and proudly advocate for it.
  一流的人机工程学不仅为人们提供了使用您的工具的理由，而且还为他们提供了使用它的理由，并为此而自豪。
• Discussing “Usability” without distinguishing between new and experienced audiences ignores important differences in a user’s relationship with the tool.
  在不区分新用户和有经验的受众的情况下讨论“可用性”时，会忽略用户与工具之间关系的重要差异。

• Distinguishing clearly between Learnability and Ergonomics helps us to better target improvements to these distinct audiences, and as we’ll see in the next article, can help us to better reposition products against competitors.

  在可学习性和人机工程学之间进行明确区分可以帮助我们更好地针对这些不同的受众进行改进，正如我们将在下一篇文章中看到的那样 ，可以帮助我们更好地将产品重新定位于竞争对手。

推荐建议 (Recommendations)

• When reviewing your backlog, start asking yourself “Is this a new Capability, a Learnability improvement, or an Ergonomic improvement?” Learn to recognize the differences between each.

  在查看您的积压订单时，请问自己“这是一项新的功能 ，一项可学习性的改进还是一项符合人体工程学的改进？” 学会认识彼此之间的差异。

• Understand that these improvements affect different audiences, and can have a markedly different impact on the success of your product. We’ll discuss how you can start prioritizing these elements in the next article.

  了解这些改进会影响不同的受众，并且会对产品的成功产生明显不同的影响。 在下一篇文章中，我们将讨论如何开始优先考虑这些元素。

接下来的是 (Coming up next)

In next week’s article, we’ll play with a simple tool for understanding how your product compares to the competition, and explore how to start making smart, focused design improvements that affect adoption and drive rabid, obsessive user love for your product. New articles every Monday — make sure you follow for updates!

在下周的文章中 ，我们将使用一个简单的工具来了解您的产品与竞争对手的比较，并探索如何开始进行明智的，专注的设计改进，从而影响产品的采用并吸引狂热的，痴迷的用户对您产品的喜爱。 每个星期一都有新文章-确保您关注更新！

Continue to Part 2

继续第二部分

This article series is the culmination of several years of collected learnings. If this was valuable to you, take a moment to think about who else you know who might benefit from reading it — Your team? Your Twitter or LinkedIn followers? — and send it their way. It would really help 🙏

本系列文章是多年收集的学习成果的结晶。 如果这对您有价值，请花点时间考虑一下您认识的其他人，谁可能会从中受益—您的团队？ 您的Twitter或LinkedIn关注者？ -并以自己的方式发送。 真的有帮助🙏

Hans van de Bruggen is a designer living in California. He has previously worked for LinkedIn and Netflix, and currently leads product design for a team at Dave, a humane banking app. Follow Hans on Twitter and here on Medium (from at least 6 feet away, please! 😷)

Hans van de Bruggen是居住在加利福尼亚的设计师。 他之前曾在LinkedIn和Netflix工作，目前在 人道银行应用程序 Dave 的团队负责产品设计 。 在Twitter上关注Hans， 在Medium 上关注 此处(请至少保持6英尺远！away)