Nielsen Norman Group

World Leaders in Research-Based User Experience

How to Measure Learnability of a User Interface

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.
By Alita Joyce on October 20, 2019 Topics: Human Computer Interaction, Psychology and UX

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.

For example, let’s say we are redesigning an enterprise file-backup application intended to be
run by IT administrators on a regular basis. We assume users will use the application
frequently enough that they will progress up that learning curve. For such an application, it is
crucial that users be able to complete their work as fast as possible. In this scenario, a
learnability study will determine how fast administrators learn to run a backup efficiently. We
recruit several representative users and invite them to the lab. Then we ask them to perform
the backup and measure how long they take to do so for the first time. Next, we ask them to
come back into the lab and do the task for a second time — again, measuring their task-
completion time. This process repeats for several more times. The result of our study will be a
learning curve which plots the task time over a set number of trials.