Timeline for Comparison of usability between Office for Windows and Mac
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
8 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Feb 17, 2021 at 6:19 | vote | accept | Michael Lai♦ | ||
| Aug 26, 2013 at 18:46 | comment | added | nadyne | You've hit on exactly my point: the users, their context, and their goals are what matters. Good user research always considers the users, their context, and their goals. Comparing the apples of a financial analyst using pivot tables to the oranges of a manager creating a list doesn't tell you anything meaningful about whether the application on one platform has a better UX. At this point, I believe we've beaten this poor horse to death. If you want to continue this conversation, I don't think that the comments thread here is the right place to do so. | |
| Aug 25, 2013 at 22:13 | comment | added | Michael Lai♦ | On the other hand, if you define a very specific task (or set of tasks), are you more likely to get a meaningful answer as it may introduce factors that are related to how these tasks are performed in the context of their work environment, the type of users, etc. Is there any reference as to how you quantify 'regular' usage versus casual usage? | |
| Aug 23, 2013 at 20:03 | comment | added | nadyne | "Regularly uses it as part of their work" is so broad as to be meaningless. Let's take Excel. A financial analyst fundamentally uses Excel in a very different way than a manager does. To do a meaningful comparison, you would have to compare people who use the application in relatively similar ways (I wouldn't compare someone who lives in pivot tables to someone who uses it to track project progress) on the two platforms. This means that you would end up with a lengthy series of studies to try to address this, and I seriously doubt that you'd get a single answer to your question. | |
| Aug 22, 2013 at 22:16 | comment | added | Michael Lai♦ | I would probably be interested in how people define this as well. I would say that if someone regular uses it as part of their work, and productivity would be defined as the tasks that they perform using the software and how efficiently they are able to complete the task. Of course, it would be better to have some benchmark to compare the results against, but that's why I am interested in finding out if there are other studies out there. | |
| Aug 22, 2013 at 21:49 | comment | added | nadyne | What do you define as an "Office:Mac user", "Windows Office user", and "productivity"? I think that if you were to try to conduct a comparison, you would have to define the research goals of the study such that you can make a valid comparison. For example, someone who uses Word:Mac less than once per week to read documents is very different than an Excel guru, and what is productive for each of them is very different. | |
| Aug 21, 2013 at 22:40 | comment | added | Michael Lai♦ | Some very interesting points here. But if you were to do a study on the productivity of Office:Mac users versus Windows Office users, would you expect to find any significant difference? So since we can't compare between them directly, perhaps some standardized usability test done separately and see what the difference is? | |
| Aug 20, 2013 at 20:20 | history | answered | nadyne | CC BY-SA 3.0 |