Long ago, far away I was given the task to find out if the Mac or Windows was more productive for the company I was working for. Since the Microsoft Office Suite was available for both platforms at the time, and the workers in the company were comfortable with it, I devised a series of tasks to serve as a performance test. Simple text editing, producing a flier, setting up a spreadsheet and so on.
We then got three people from each side, so to speak. Three expert users of MS office on Windows and three people from the marketing department who were familiar with MS Office on the mac.
We set them all down on Windows machines and had them do the tasks. As expected the windows people got the tasks done 10% faster than the Mac people.
We then set them all down on Macs and ran them through a similar set of tasks.
As expected, the Mac people got the job done 30% faster than the Windows people. However the big surprize is that the Windows people got the job done 10% faster than they were able to do it using Windows!
We called this the "Butt In Chair" index as the only thing we were measureing was how long a person had to sit in front of the screen to get the job done.
We did not go into detail about WHY these results came out the way they did, but there's obviously something about the Mac interface that makes people more effective, but as far as I can tell the productivity of the Mac platform continues to outperform the Windows platform.
I'm forced to use Win XP at work and it's a relief to come home to MacOS X. If you have any questions about the Mac/Windows/Linux usability question, please do your own BIC tests. If you have any questions about how to do it, email me.
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Long ago, far away I was given the task to find out if the Mac or Windows was more productive for the company I was working for. Since the Microsoft Office Suite was available for both platforms at the time, and the workers in the company were comfortable with it, I devised a series of tasks to serve as a performance test. Simple text editing, producing a flier, setting up a spreadsheet and so on.
We then got three people from each side, so to speak. Three expert users of MS office on Windows and three people from the marketing department who were familiar with MS Office on the mac.
We set them all down on Windows machines and had them do the tasks. As expected the windows people got the tasks done 10% faster than the Mac people.
We then set them all down on Macs and ran them through a similar set of tasks.
As expected, the Mac people got the job done 30% faster than the Windows people. However the big surprize is that the Windows people got the job done 10% faster than they were able to do it using Windows!
We called this the "Butt In Chair" index as the only thing we were measureing was how long a person had to sit in front of the screen to get the job done.
We did not go into detail about WHY these results came out the way they did, but there's obviously something about the Mac interface that makes people more effective, but as far as I can tell the productivity of the Mac platform continues to outperform the Windows platform.
I'm forced to use Win XP at work and it's a relief to come home to MacOS X. If you have any questions about the Mac/Windows/Linux usability question, please do your own BIC tests. If you have any questions about how to do it, email me.