During my erasmus programme, I am taking courses from the master on interaction design, something that I’ve wanted to learn for a while now. Right now I am taking “Graphical User Interfaces” where Usability is a main concern.
I’ve read about this but Russell Beattie makes an excellent suggestion on how to measure the usability and ease of use of an interface. This might be used as a guide line, but I don’t believe it should be followed blindly. Sometimes more “expensive” actions may have better results if you want more consistency across your application, or if the user can learn something with the process, or there are just too many ways of using your application that you can’t predict all of them.
As a tool for comparing different options, this is an good way of having an idea of which one is the best, even before running some usability tests.