Clarifying and differentiating discoverability

ABSTRACT

Everyday users are confronted with increasingly complex technologies, be that novel introductions or ever-changing and expanding familiar interfaces. This creates the challenge of users needing to perpetually discover new functionality and interactivity, which is rarely addressed when novel technology is proposed. A possible contributing factor for this is the variety of, often inconsistently defined, associated concepts and a consequent lack of clarity on how to address these problems. We examine usage and definitions of discoverability as well as related concepts and offer clarifications where definitions are ambiguous while highlighting focus areas and limitations. In doing so, we provide a clear definition of discoverability, underscore the separation of system, feature and interaction discoverability and elucidate how other concepts focused on initial interactions differ.

GRAPHICAL ABSTRACT

KEYWORDS:

• Discoverability
• initial interaction
• terminology
• learnability
• communicability

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

HCI editorial record

First received on date. Revisions received on date, date, and date. Accepted by action-editor-name. Final manuscript received on date.

Notes

¹ In the remaining of the document, we may use the term “initial interaction” alone to refer to the first time a user successfully interacts with a novel system, input technique or functionality.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Agence Nationale de la Recherche under Grant [Discovery, ANR-19-CE33-0006].

Notes on contributors

Eva Mackamul

Eva Mackamul ([email protected], https://evamackamul.com/) is a researcher with an interest in supporting novice users in initial interactions; she completed her PhD in the Loki research team at the Inria centre at the University of Lille.

Géry Casiez

Géry Casiez ([email protected], https://cristal.univ-lille.fr/casiez/) is a computer scientist with an interest in Human-Computer Interaction; he is a Professor in the Loki research team of CRIStAL and the Inria centre at the University of Lille.

Sylvain Malacria

Sylvain Malacria ([email protected], http://www.malacria.com) is a tenured research scientist in the Loki research team of CRIStAL and the Inria centre at the University of Lille. His research investigates the design of novel interactive systems, with an additional focus on how interaction possibilities can be better communicated to the users.