Nielsen: Test Report on iPad Ease

The well-known user experience and usability consulting firm Nielsen Norman Group recently released their test report on the ease of use of the iPad, the result is not optimistic. The report pointed out that the current iPad software in the user interface uniformity and design concepts have major shortcomings, which is further reminders: what is dubbed the "big iPhone" iPad, what are the interface design and interactive design proposed what new Requirements and challenges? As a user, for the ten-inch touch screen and 3.5-inch touch screen will have what kind of different expectations? In the absence of an authoritative interface design specification for iPad software, the report deserves a close reading of all the designers and programmers who are and will be doing the iPad software. The full report is ninety pages in total. PDF files can be downloaded here. Jacob Nelson himself wrote an overview blog, translated into Chinese as follows. It should be noted that the test object here is mainly on the iPad third-party software, the problems listed in the report Apple's own design iPad software better. - Editor

Summary: iPad software interface design lacks uniformity, a variety of functions are not easily detected by the user, the user inadvertently gestures can easily cause misuse. In addition, the metaphor of the entire interface is too close to print, human-computer interaction is also very weird, which will result in further ease of use.

"It looks like a large iPhone," this is the first reaction we've heard from users asking us to test the iPad. (The second reaction? "Wow, so heavy.")

But from the interactive design point of view, the iPad's interface should not just be an enlarged version of the iPhone's interface.

Indeed, our research shows that the tab bar at the bottom of the iPad is far less effective than the iPhone. On the iPhone's small screen, users can easily notice the tab bar that remains at the bottom even if they focus on the center of the screen. But the iPad's big screen means the user's gaze is farther away from the tab bar and thus ignores (forgets) those few buttons.

There is one more important difference between the iPad and the iPhone: the average site is often pretty good on the iPad. In the iPhone usability studies we did earlier, users saw the experience of using native software far better than direct web browsing. It's very painful to visit most sites on that small screen. (Mobile-optimized websites are better, but even those pages are not as easy to use as the native software.)

On the big screen of the iPad, the ease of use of regular web pages is acceptable. Of course, the problem of "finger hypertrophy" still exists - this is a problem for all touch screens, where a user with a thicker finger can not accurately tap a smaller target on the screen. The iPad has a "read / click size asymmetry" problem: texts that are large enough for the user to see may not be able to get everyone in exactly the right spot. Therefore, we strongly recommend using a larger tap area for sites that want to appeal to iPad users.

In addition, the visual elements of the iPad software environment are relatively simple, the rules are relatively complete, and most of the experience of the webpage is much richer and more complex. When a user clicks on a link in a native iPad software to jump to the browser, it may not be appropriate.

For the past dozen or so years, whenever we asked people the first impression of a web page designed for a desktop browser, their most commonly used words were "dazzling." The first impression users have of many iPad apps is "pretty." This more comfortable user experience is certainly good, especially for a device that prefers casual computers - not business PCs. However, if the software is beautiful, but can not be the actual benefits of the user through features and content, can not be said to be qualified.

Our initial study of the ease of use of the iPad software took place weeks after Apple released the iPad. We tested seven users, each of whom had at least three months of iPhone experience, but only one used iPad in advance.

(This person only spent a week - in the past when we conducted usability testing, participants were required to have at least a year of device experience.)

The survey report of course presented only preliminary results. However, we decided to release it because the iPad platform is special and in the coming months we will see quite a bit of iPad software being born. If we already know something about the ease of use of the iPad software, no matter how elementary it is, it's a shame not to share it with the designers of the software.

We tested the following software and website:

- ABC player
- Alice in Wonderland Lite
- AP News
- Art Authority
- BBC News
- Bloomberg
- craigsphone (Craigslist)
- eBay (native software, as well as ebay.com)
- The Elements (Physics Course Software)
- Endless.com
- Epicurious
- ESPN Score Center
- ESPN.com
- Gap
- Gilt
- GQ
- GWR Lite (Guinness World Records)
iBooks
- IMDb
iverse Comics
- Kayak (kayak.com)
- Marvel Comics
- MLB.com
- Nike.com
Now Playing
- NPR (National Radio)
- The New York Times Editors' Choice
- Popular Science
- Time Magazine
- USA Today
- virginamerica.com
- whitehouse.gov
- Wolfram Alpha
- Yahoo! Entertainment

The first batch of iPad software reminiscent of the 1993 web design. At that time, Mosaic had just invented the "image hot zone" technology, you can set any area of ​​any picture as an interface element. So graphic designers flock to: Anything that can be drawn can be used as an interface element, irrespective of fit.

The same applies to iPad software: anything that can be displayed and touched can be used as an interface element. No standard at all, the designer does not know what the user's expectations.

What's worse is that there is no consensus on what kinds of screen elements should react after a user clicks. The more common aesthetic is the use of flatter graphics and visual elements that make the software look as if it were etched on the iPad screen. There is no light model nor a disguised three-dimensional sense that a visual element is "raised" or "sunk" (and therefore interactive).

In contrast, the design of desktop software has always been widely accepted by the design interface of the graphical interface, such as buttons that appear to be raised are clickable, scrollbars and other interactive elements must be visually and content clearly different.

The "separation of religion fromism" in traditional graphic interface design - that is, the separation of content and function / instruction - was brought into the world of modern web design. The kind of image hotspot design of 1993 has fallen out of favor, and no website that wants to be commercially developed on the internet can reuse that style anymore.

The "screen-etching" style of the iPad software does look good. No visual disturbances, no buttons that look technical. But this look is at the cost of ease of use. More specifically, an easy-to-use problem that has disappeared since the mid-1990s has reappeared: Users do not know where they can click.

The main problem facing the web accessibility study over the past fifteen years is not that users do not know what options they have, but that they do not know where to go and do not know which option to choose. iPad software interface let us return to the origin.

To further exacerbate the problem is: users find out the usage of the interface, the iPad can not be repeated in the application of this usage. The interface used by each software to perform similar functions is completely different.

For example, in different software, tapping a picture may result in the following five results:

- no result
- The picture is enlarged
- enter the detailed page on this picture (hyperlink)
- The picture is flipped to reveal other pictures of the same place (the metaphor here is that the new picture is "behind" the original picture)
- pop-up navigation options

USA Today uses the last design: if you click on a newspaper's logo, it will pop up a navigation menu with various sections of the newspaper. This is probably the most surprising aspect of the interactive design we've tested, and none of the users thought it would.

Similarly, when the user reads the bottom of the screen, if you want to continue reading, you may encounter the following three different designs:

- still stay on the same page and scroll down in the text area. The problem here is that you have to scroll within the text area, but the text area does not make a big difference on the screen, so users have to guess to see which texts are scrollable.

- Swipe the page to the left by hand (this sometimes takes you to "next article," not to the next page in the same article). However, there are problems with this gesture. For example, in the New York Times iPad version, when an area is blocked by advertisement, it is not useful to slide to the left.

- Swipe the page up by hand.

iPad interface elements There are currently three major issues that will cause the user's confusion:

- Difficult to discover: Under the visual aesthetics of "Etched Glass," interface elements are hidden, and users do not know where they can interact.

- Not easy to remember: sections of the iPad software design different interactive gestures, will increase the learning difficulty. If you can make more use of standard gestures, will be of great benefit.

- Easy touch: a user accidentally pressed somewhere, or a gesture inadvertently triggered a function.

Putting these three ease-of-use issues together, the user experience on the iPad tends to show "do not know what happened" or "do not know what to do again with the same result." To make matters worse, users often do not know how to get back to their previous state due to the lack of a unified "undo" feature on their iPad software (similar to the "Back" button in their browser).

Many content-based software uses a design that "swipes your screen with your finger to jump to the next article," an interface metaphor from print. This metaphor is so deeply rooted that the titles of articles in the cover pages of these softwares can not be tapped to jump to the article itself. The iPad software has basically no concept of homepage, but our test results show that users all need similar homepage features. (They also often need to search, which is absent in many software.)

In the electronic media, the concept of a linear "next article" is not reasonable. Readers prefer to choose from a menu of interrelated items and decide what to do next.

The design of the user experience on the iPad has a strategic question: what should be empowered to the user, or adhere to the author's authority? Some early design restrictions too much. Long-term use of the World Wide Web experience allows users to learn to appreciate the freedom and control, over-linear experience is difficult to make them satisfied.

Content publishers want to increase their value by designing each publication as a separate software environment. Similarly, they also hope that users will no longer spend countless pages, but spend time in a handful of software, think it will bring higher added value.

When a typical user uses a desktop browser, he can easily access a hundred websites a week, most of them only look at one to three pages. (For example, in a test, a few B2B users visited a total of fifteen websites and spent an average of twenty-nine seconds on each page.) Most sites will only be visited once, either because The user did not accidentally encounter during the search process, either from a link posted on a post on another site or social media. In the absence of real user relationships, content sites are of no value, and 90% of the economic value of users' time online is taken by search engines.

The current design strategy for iPad software is undoubtedly moving toward creating an immersive experience that increases the user's stickiness to individual sources of information. This is contrary to the revelation that the World Wide Web gives us. Varying polymorphism is the source of the power of the World Wide Web and no website can expect to capture the user's full attention. Users frequently jump between websites and websites, driving designers to follow interface design specifications and creating sites that users can use without having to learn (or even look at them). If iPad users really only lock a few commonly used software, then it's design ideas will be very different.

User interface pioneer Jef Raskin once distinguished two distinct hypertext models with "cards" and "scrolls:

Card canvas size is fixed. You can arrange information in this two-dimensional space (you can achieve a beautiful layout), but you can not expand the size of the area. Users want to see more information, you must jump to another card. HyperCard is the most famous example of a card model.

The reel has enough space for any amount of information because the canvas is free to stretch. The user does not need to jump often, but the layout of the reels is usually less elaborate because the designer can not control what the user can see at any point in time.

The World Wide Web is definitely a reel, especially today. Scrolling webpages is a staple, and users sometimes see deep information at the bottom of long webpages. Even mobile software often uses scroll-type interfaces to render small screens unattainable.

In contrast, the card design in the early iPad software design dominance. Scrolls will also appear on the screen from time to time, but most software tries to present a fixed page layout on this beautiful screen.

It is not surprising that the two models coexist: the iPad is dominated by the card genre and the desktop is dominated by the scrolls (the handset is in between). However, the integration of the two models is also possible, and the advantages of a scroll-style interaction may make users expect iPad software to adopt it more.

Despite the limitations of this initial user study, it provides an orientation on how to design an easy-to-use iPad app:

- Increase the three-dimensional sense of interface elements to better define individual interaction areas, allowing users to be aware of the features this element may provide, thereby reducing the difficulty of finding interactive elements.

- In order to achieve the above interaction improvement, it is necessary to give up etching glass aesthetics. The first iPad apps make heavy use of flattened visual elements, and adding other visual elements to this foundation may make the screen appear less aesthetically pleasing, but designers can make up for it by using more subtle graphical interfaces. For example, the graphical interface style that Windows 7 inherits from Apple is too extensive.

- Do not try to add value through weird design. A better way is to keep the interactivity of the elements of the interaction so that users focus on the content itself, not on how to find it.

- Support for standardized navigation, add "back" to most software, search, clickable article titles, and homepage options.

Although our foot print gives more detailed advice, we obviously have not yet developed a complete set of design rules.

One important question comes after about a year - after we've looked at how people use iPads on weekdays - is there an answer: Will the user's activity on the iPad be more immersed than the desktop and mobile web? Sex-based experience? In other words, how many people will lock and in-depth use of the software? Or that in the frequent jump between multiple software, each superficial?

Perhaps people will choose to have cleverly targeted activities on their desktops, such as researching new topics or managing direct shopping such as shopping and investing. The iPad focuses on leisure, for example, chasing news (whether it's "real" news or being a friend's update on social networking sites) and spending entertainment. We do not know the answer to this question yet, but it determines how much the iPad's current weird user interface needs to be improved.

-

【例 1】 The so-called "metaphor" here refers to the mapping of the graphical interface to real-world entities. For example, the concept of "desktop" in a computer is a metaphor for the physical office desk. The trash can used to represent the trash can is a metaphor for the physical trash can. The page turning effect of iBooks is a metaphor for the effect of turning a page of physical paper.

Message: http://apple4.us/2010/05/nielsen-norman-ipad-usability-first-findings.html