93-page review of iPad apps and website usablilty now available for download

[40hz]

The Nielsen Norman Group has just released a detailed report discussing usability features and issues with Apple's newest wunderkind.

This report is based on usability studies with real users, reporting how they actually used a broad variety of iPad apps as well as websites accessed on the iPad.

We are making this report available for free to support our loyal audience of usability enthusiasts by providing them with early empirical data about iPad usability. This report is less thorough than our normal research reports and does not contain as many detailed and actionable design guidelines as we usually provide. We decided to publish the report anyway (as a donation to the community) because all experience from the last 30 years of usability shows that early usability findings have disproportionally large impact on design projects.

The full report is avaiable as a PDF download.

Further info and download link here: http://www.nngroup.com/reports/mobile/ipad/

Jakob Neilsen's summary of the report is available on his blogsite.

iPad Usability: First Findings From User Testing

  Summary:
    iPad apps are inconsistent and have low feature discoverability, with frequent user errors due to accidental gestures. An overly strong print metaphor and weird interaction styles cause further usability problems.

"It looks like a giant iPhone," is the first thing users say when asked to test an iPad. (Their second comment? "Wow, it's heavy.")

But from an interaction design perspective, an iPad user interface shouldn't be a scaled-up iPhone UI.

Link: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/ipad.html

w/thx to the folks over at  Techmeme ( www.techmeme.com) for making this find.

[Stoic Joker]

I haven't read the full report yet, but by the sound of the summary it's not exactly glowing.

[JavaJones]

Yes, a very interesting report (at 93 pages it's "not as detailed as usual", I'm afraid to read some of their other stuff!). As one commenter on Betanews regarding the same report said, it focuses on app UIs, many of which are 3rd party, so it's not solely about the iPad *as Apple designed it* (and the iPad UI itself), but still very interesting commentary.

- Oshyan