To me, designing efficient software is about software performance, this is UX design, which absolutely is a sign of a good product, but much like software engineering, their is more to it than just efficiency. Efficiency could be a very good measure of the quality of the product and the design, however, A highly efficient process could be worse than a less efficient one, in the case where you are accomplishing a task which is done rarely and the user needs more guidance than average.
We are having that issue with an Alpha product we just released this week. The main dev (who has more experience with IOS than the rest of us) thought he had designed a process that other IOS devs would find easy. Us other internal testers were told "you don't know how to do it because you're not an IOS dev", and we accepted that, until we got feedback from a few other users that they didn't know how to find/do certain things. The fix, an inefficient process that walks users through step-by-step.
If you were to do a video comparing the old version to the new, the old version is far quicker, for somebody who knows what they are doing (and the creator), but nearly impossible and hours long for the rest of us. The new system can be completed in a couple of minutes. Less efficient if we did a side-by-side comparison like the video in the post, but actually much more effective.
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[ 6.1 ms ] story [ 32.4 ms ] threadWe are having that issue with an Alpha product we just released this week. The main dev (who has more experience with IOS than the rest of us) thought he had designed a process that other IOS devs would find easy. Us other internal testers were told "you don't know how to do it because you're not an IOS dev", and we accepted that, until we got feedback from a few other users that they didn't know how to find/do certain things. The fix, an inefficient process that walks users through step-by-step.
If you were to do a video comparing the old version to the new, the old version is far quicker, for somebody who knows what they are doing (and the creator), but nearly impossible and hours long for the rest of us. The new system can be completed in a couple of minutes. Less efficient if we did a side-by-side comparison like the video in the post, but actually much more effective.