Jakob Nielsen on iPad Usability: First Findings | Hacker News Reader

Jakob Nielsen on iPad Usability: First Findings

useit.com

138 pointsadnam29 comments

The discoverability of commands is particularly important, and something I noticed a lot after starting out with iPod Touch, then Android (Nexus One), then iPad.

With iPod / iPhone / iPad, applications need to be very carefully designed to reveal actions; but every application exposes those actions in slightly different ways. Android, on the other hand, has built-in buttons for Back and Menu, and has a generally common theme of long-press for "context-menu"-like action. This ends up making Apple-platform apps inconsistent, occasionally brilliant but frequently odd, while Android apps are pedestrian but consistently usable, in the sense that actions can easily be discovered and reasonably easily invoked, but not necessarily with a minimum of taps - usually there's at least one or two extra taps involved with Android apps.

I think the optimum would be somewhere in between. Android has too many buttons: the Search button is ironically mostly redundant. The consistency of a back button works really well. The utility of a menu button is debatable; it many ways, it's a cop-out. I wonder if a universal gesture might be more appropriate, a little like the status area of Android is accessed with a pull-down from the top of the screen. Perhaps a pull-up from the bottom for general actions?

>Perhaps a pull-up from the bottom for general actions?

Stealing part of the touch screen for consistent app-related behavior really limits what you can do with it I think. The menu button is great ui for games in particular that really need a button to differentiate from all the touching and tapping you'll be doing on the rest of the screen.

Discoverability on iPhoneOS also suffers from the lack of a mouse pointer, since that takes 'hovering' out of the equation. On the desktop we take for granted the ability to mouseover something to test for clickability (the common case being the mouse arrow turning into a pointing finger when hovering over a link).

Hm. Maybe a "hinting" gesture would work well.

Tap in the upper left corner, and all clickable text/borders becomes distinct (tinted background, etc).

Reading the 93 page full report now...

Kudos to Jakob Nielsen:

"We decided to publish the full report anyway (as a donation to the community) because all experiences from the last 30 years of usability shows that early usability findings have a disproportionally large impact on design projects."

http://s3.amazonaws.com/nngroup/ipad-usability.pdf

Surely, the reality is that Nielsen wants to increase his relevance by glomming on to the current hype surrounding the iPad. Hence he releases the report is a freebie.

I am glad he did this, now I actually have an idea about the product he sells.

One of the best ways to market yourself is to give away freebies.

For example, I knew a graphic designer who did pro-bono work for some non-profit organizations. He did really good work and some of the non-profit board members gave him work to do. Really lucrative work - corporate annual reports.

You're probably right, but in all honesty, if you didn't know Jakob Nielsen before, you probably have never worked with usability testing.

Right, but that's because he's really good at increasing his visibility, not because his work is as fundamental to the field as, say, Shneiderman or Newell or even Norman.

Is there anybody even close to Nielsen in the industry? He is pretty much the Edward Tufte of UI.

However, here is a contradictory article from an insider:

http://experiencedynamics.blogs.com/site_search_usability/20...

> Jakob Nielsen has become a hot item over the last five years with regard to website usability.

For as long as I have been on the web, I remember Jakob Nielsen's useit.com. This was back in 1994.

Interesting findings for iPad developers, there's a free 93-page download at the bottom as well. I would hate to see iPad development in the same quagmire as DVD menus.

That's an excellent parallel.

1) i wish they'd post videos of their usability testing

2) 7 users seem like a small sample. I wonder what their ages and backgrounds were.

According to Jakob Nielsen 5 users is enough: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20000319.html

Ok, I can buy that. I wonder why he chose 7 then in this case.

That's how many were walking through the hallway.

Unless you're doing quantitative research (which is hard when it comes to how people are using stuff) there are practical difficulties in handling all the data if you have a much bigger sample.

I don't like the proportion of critique vs suggestions. Nielsen critiques a lot, but his suggestions are limited to a few broad strokes. I expected better from a usability guru.

I frankly think it's how it should be. He's really good in testing and analysis. Focusing in the solution is almost like an entirely different matter.

Maybe he's not really a usability guru, but rather a lack-of-usability guru.

You don't have to play a violin well, or even at all to hear someone just messed up.

Maybe he can't give detailed suggestions, but is just able to indicate something is amiss.

That by itself is a valuable service.

There are constant references to the etched-glass aesthetic with no examples or explanation, and while I am pretty familiar with iPad reviews and whatnot, I have no idea what this means.

He gives a little context on page 6: "Worse, there are often no perceived affordances for how various screen elements respond when touched. The prevailing aesthetic is very much that of flat images that fill the screen as if they were etched. There’s no lighting model or pseudo-dimensionality to indicate raised or lowered visual elements that call out to be activated."

I wonder if Jakob Nielsen would have popped a vein and died on the spot had he tried another mobile platform or tablet. Really - 7 users? A handful of apps? And how does the developers' lack of HID adhering make the iPad itself "unusable"? Really...

Statistically speaking, 5 is enough to get a rough idea.

Also, a lot of the problems he has with the iPad do not show up on the N900. He would probably like that.

A while ago, I was watching an N900 user trying out an iPad. It was interesting to see that he had substantial difficulty figuring out how to move back in nested screen hierarchies. He was actually trying to press on the black border around the screen to go back, because on the N900 all dialogs are designed so that clicking anywhere in the area "behind" the dialog takes you back.

IMHO, that "buttonless back button" is perhaps the best thing about the N900's UI design.

Can you illustrate what you're talking about? I'll see if I can youtube someone playing with an N900..

It sounds like you simply tap anywhere but the dialog and it's "canceled"?

It sounds like you simply tap anywhere but the dialog and it's "canceled"?

Yes. When a modal dialog is active, Maemo also blurs and darkens the background so it's obvious that it's inactive.

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