

iPad Usability: Year One - joshuacc
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/ipad.html

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apitaru
For those not familiar with Jacob Nielsen, take a look at his article -
"Flash: 99% Bad"

<http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20001029.html>

It was written in 2000 - at the hight of Flash craze. He was right then, and
he is right today .. UI/UX designers should pay close attention to this man's
analysis.

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kingsidharth
I've seen people reading more, now that they've iPad. Content websites should
consider creating a usable experience for iPad. It's a focus and regular
audience

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joejohnson
For an article on usability, that page was terribly hard to look at.

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SoftwareMaven
Don't conflate pretty with usable. Useit.com is one of the best sites there is
about usability, and it is backed up with real data. While it may not be
pretty, it is eminently usable.

Edit: fix typo

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efsavage
"real data"

That's a stretch. Look how many people are in some of these studies. Well, you
could look if he bothered to tell you, which he rarely does, because I'm
guessing these aren't actually "studies" but are actually interviews with some
soundbytes extracted to back up preconceived notions.

I'm not saying he's always wrong, that would entail gathering and presenting
actual data, but he's never given me any good reason to think he's right
rather than just a pundit with first-mover advantage.

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ugh
Not many people are needed to identify usability problems. If you want to
quantify the effects you indeed need many, many people but Nielsen doesn’t
actually do that. Three, four, five people are plenty for those kinds of
studies.

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efsavage
Not many people are needed to test _specific_ problems with _specific_
environments/programs/features. 24 of 26 people not being able to figure out
how to sign up for hacker news would be a clearly identified problem. Drawing
overarching conclusions about the entire ipad ecosystem from 16 out of 50
million users on 26 apps out of ~100,000 and providing no methodology, no
data? That's not enough to distill into "ipad usability" for an entire year.

He'd have far more credibility if he simply said "I don't like this feature,
and after asking several people, I know I'm not the only one. Here's why I
don't like it, and here's what I think can be done about it."

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ugh
He sits them in front of computer and looks what they are doing. That would be
a terrible way of finding specific problems. It’s a great way of searching for
problems. I suggest you look into the method Nielsen actually uses.

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efsavage
I know how he does it, that's my point.

Would you be able to make useful, high-level recommendations to the auto
industry after riding in the back seat of 26 drivers for an hour or so? Do you
think it matters what kind of car you're driving? What kind of roads you're
driving on? What time of day it is? What state or country you're in? Of course
it does. If your conclusion is that "driving on the PCH in a convertible is
fun" then, no, you don't need many participants or any scientific rigor. But
if you're say things like "the roads aren't wide enough" or "radios are too
loud" or "signs aren't big enough" then you're going to need to back that up
with some context and some data.

My beef here is that people who don't want to really think about this stuff
but want to seem like they do will read articles like his, which draw
conclusions of the latter type described above, and spout them off as
authoritative science, because that's how it's presented by Jakob Nielsen, Ph.
D. This confuses clients and teams and ends up having people defend their
decisions against a ghost of a misinterpretion of a supposed rule, and
ultimately yields an inferior product. I've seen his articles quoted verbatim
by designers and clients alike, almost always solely to justify their own
opinion, but with the weight of his authority.

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ugh
_Would you be able to make useful, high-level recommendations to the auto
industry after riding in the back seat of 26 drivers for an hour or so?_

I certainly do believe that to be possible, yes.

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efsavage
Interesting, any ideas what those might be? I'm genuinely curious because I
actually can't think of any.

