iPad Revisits Old User Interface Issues
In many ways, the iPad and tablet experience generally resurface problems that haven’t existed for more than a decade, namely, “how to navigate” applications and “what will I do with this device.?”
“For the last fifteen years of Web usability research, the main problems have been that users don’t know where to go or which option to choose—not that they don’t even know which options exist,” says usability specialist Jakob Nielsen, owner of Nielsen Norman Group. “With iPad UIs, we’re back to this square one.”
The iPad, in fact, presents different user interface issues than do iPhones. “In our iPhone usability studies, users strongly prefer using apps to going on the Web,” says Nielsen. “It’s simply too painful to use most websites on the small screen.”
The iPad’s bigger screen offers reasonable usability for regular Web pages. But navigation is an issue.
To exacerbate the problem, once they do figure out how something works, users can’t transfer their skills from one app to the next. Each application has a completely different UI for similar features.
In different apps, touching a picture could produce any of the following five results:
• Nothing happens
• Enlarging the picture
• Hyperlinking to a more detailed page about that item
• Flipping the image to reveal additional pictures in the same place (metaphorically, these new pictures are “on the back side” of the original picture)
• Popping up a set of navigation choices
The iPad offers no homepages, even though users strongly desired homepage-like features in our testing. They also often wanted search, which was typically not provided, he says. The app experience is highly curated, quite different at the moment from the Web, which is open.
Using the Web has given people an appreciation for freedom and control, and they’re unlikely to happily revert to a linear experience, Nielsen says. That suggests apps might develop as a curated form of mobile application usage, where PCs will remain the channel of choice for many Web applications heavy on discorvery and browsing.
The current design strategy of iPad apps definitely aims to create more immersive experiences, in the hope of inspiring deeper attachments to individual information sources, says Nielsen. This cuts against the lesson of the Web, where diversity is strength.
One big question will remain unanswered for a year or so until we see how daily use of the iPad evolves: Will people use the iPad mainly for more immersive experiences than the desktop and mobile Webs? In other words, will people primarily settle on a few sources and dig into them intensively, rather than move rapidly between many sources and give each cursory attention?
Maybe people will begin to use the desktop Web for more goal-driven activities, such as researching new issues or performing directed tasks like shopping and managing their investments. And they might use the iPad for more leisurely activities, such as keeping up with the news (whether “real” news or social network updates) and consuming entertainment-oriented content. We don’t know yet
http://www.nngroup.com/reports/mobile/ipad/ipad-usability.pdf
