iPad Receives Some Jakob Nielsen Usability Scrutiny

11 May 2010 by Graham Lyons - News apple, iPad, Jakob Nielsen No Comments

As you might imagine, we are big usability fans here at Cozy Digital. We often spend our days analysing how a site operates and writing reports for our clients. So when we saw that usability guru Jakob Nielsen had released a preliminary study of the iPad, we rushed to read his findings.

The idea of a touch screen for a computer interface is not exactly a new one, we’ve probably all used a slightly clunky information point at some time and found the experience to be quite a rudimentary one. Like the iPhone before it, the iPad takes the idea of a touch based interface forward another step – it is a computer where the screen itself is the means of interaction.

Mr Nielsens report certainly makes for some very interesting reading, and you would have to say that not all of the findings are positive. There are not only basic issues with the size of the text:

“The iPad has a read–tap asymmetry, where text big enough to be read is too small to touch. Thus, we definitely recommend large touch zones on any Web page hoping to attract many iPad users.”

But there are also comments about how the famous home screen navigation translates to the iPad:

“one finding from our study is that the tab bar at the bottom of the screen works much worse on iPad than on iPhone. On the small phone, users are likely to notice the muted icons at the bottom of the screen, even if their attention is on content in the middle of the screen. But the iPad’s much bigger screen means that users are typically directing their gaze far from the tab bar and they ignore (and forget) those buttons.”

It’s all really interesting stuff. I was especially intrigued with the comments regarding interface design and some inconsistent interaction across apps. All in all its well worth reading.

The full report can be read on Jakob Nielsen’s useit.com site.