Pete, This is not a product review. It is a summary of an academic study. In the summary that you read, he isn't expressing his personal like or dislike for the iPad. His conclusion is based on the results of the testing of the people in his study. The way those tests work is they tell the person to do something, without telling them how, and they observe how the person tries to accomplish the task. How long it takes a person to accomplish a task, how many mistakes they make, and even things like their frustration level are logged. In user interface design, the goal is to design interfaces that work like people expect, not to train people to work a particular interface. Of course, nothing is always obvious to all people, but the goal is to make the operation as obvious to as many people as is possible.
Some of this won't apply to blind people. VoiceOver gives blindies clues about what is clickable and what isn't. Sighted people don't have any automatic cues, like clickable things are circled or highlighted, though. As far as the buttons at the bottom, that might be obvious to you, but not necessarily obvious to a sighted person. In western language, flow starts at the top left, and continues down while scanning across each row. Even though sighted people can see an entire screen at once, they can't focus on all of it read it all at once. Since they're trained, through reading, to scan left to right, top to bottom, this is also the common pattern that they use to scan a screen like the iPad. Of course, any experienced iPad user will eventually learn to look to the bottom for buttons to switch between pages, but that is something that must be learned. The more obvious way to do it is to put tabs at the top of the window. A sighted person looking at cards in a card file, for example, will see labeled tabs sticking out of the top of the cards. That's why multi page dialog boxes on Windows and OSX display their dialogs this way. This whole left to right, top to bottom approach is also why the OSX menu bar is at the top of the screen, while the dock is at the bottom. Any user wondering "where should I go next", or "how do I get back to the screen that does that thing", will naturally start looking at the top of the screen. Beyond that, there are gesture reasons for the menu bar being up there, such as the mouse gesture for zipping to the top of the screen is very easy (just push the mouse away from you). By contrast, the dock, at the bottom, is the last thing they see. This is because you're likely to need to perform actions in the current program before you need to switch to another constantly. Also, the dock isn't extremely useful to sighted users, as most of them would just switch to another app by clicking a visible portion of one of the app's windows. Apple has very strong interface guidelines for designing desktop apps, but they aren't as strict, at least in that area, for mobile apps. So, he says that developers are left to their own ideas about how apps should work, and the result is that not everyone knows what to expect from app to app. Anyway, all that to say that this guy is an expert in user interface design, and his highly informed and tested conclusion is that better choices could have been made to make it so that the iPad's operation was more obvious to untrained people than it is now. Bryan On May 11, 2010, at 9:42 AM, Pete Nalda wrote: > Thanks for the article. While he makes some valid points, I get the feeling > he just doesn't like the iPad. That's ok, but the first thing he complains > about is the dock. I had no problem noticing it myself. I think that anyone > would be inclined to study the whole screen, and not just the top, and I'd > bet that people would read reviews where they talk about it. Also that "Tab > Bar" is called a Dock. The rest of the review just sort of follows this > complaint. Also, he didn't even review the built in apps at all. What about > ibooks? I'm sorry, I still get the idea he just wants to hate the iPad and > for that matter probably hates Apple's way of doing things. > > On May 11, 2010, at 3:53 AM, Dónal Fitzpatrick wrote: > >> Hi all, >> >> I don't know if many on this list will be familiar with the work of >> Jacob Nielsen. For those who don't know him, he's one of the >> foremost minds in the field of interaction design. Those who took >> (or are taking) computer science at University may have encountered >> his work during courses in HCI or User-Interaction design. He is >> well-known for the famous "Nielsen's 10 heuristics" which play a major part >> in interface design. >> >> Anyway he's done some testing on the iPad. I don't have one myself, >> and don't have a personal interest in getting one (though I may get >> one for my lab to do some projects on), but I thought the link below >> might interest some people on the list. >> >> http://www.useit.com/alertbox/ipad.html >> >> Enjoy, >> >> Dónal >> >> -- >> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups >> "MacVisionaries" group. >> To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. >> To unsubscribe from this group, send email to >> [email protected]. >> For more options, visit this group at >> http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries?hl=en. >> > > Egun On, Lagunak! (Basque for G'day, Mates) Pete Nalda > http://www.myspace.com/musikonalda > http://www.facebook.com/lpnalda > > > > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "MacVisionaries" group. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > [email protected]. > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries?hl=en. > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MacVisionaries" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MacVisionaries" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries?hl=en.
