7-inch tablets have either a glorious future or will fail miserably. I doubt there’s a middle path in their future.
via Kindle Fire Usability Findings (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox).
So will the Fire sell in the millions? or will it be a fire sale?
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Tags: usability
All check boxes have labels, but not all check boxes use label tags to dis play their labels. This can cre ate click ing prob lems for users. Check boxes are small and hard to tar get. With out the label tags, users can’t click the check box labels to tick the check box. Instead, they’re forced to tar get and click the small check box itself, which can cause user frus tra tion, espe cially for motor-impaired users.
via Why Your Form Checkboxes Should Always Use Label Tags – UX Movement.
Obviously, tablets might become truly personal devices in the future as competition drives down the prices. But for now, you should assume that youre designing for a multi-user device. For example, users might be reluctant to stay permanently signed in on an app, and theyll still forget their passwords. Its also important to design recognizable application icons so theyll stand out in the crowded listings of several users apps.
Tags: usability
Having worked with interaction and graphical design for iPhone applications during the last couple of years I’ve managed to pick up some lessons the hard way, and in this post I would like to share my thoughts on a couple of do’s and don’ts.
Tags: usability
Clients say the darnedest things. The other day, one scoffed, “Anyone who’s looking at our website on a stupid little phone screen probably isn’t our customer anyway.”
Summary:
The easier it is to find places with good information, the less time users will spend visiting any individual website. This is one of many conclusions that follow from analyzing how people optimize their behavior in online information systems.
via Information Foraging: Why Google Makes People Leave Your Site Faster (Alertbox).
Worth pointing to. Been out there since 2003.
Tags: usability
The recent hubbub about Delicious got me thinking about bookmarking in general, and brought to mind a long-standing irritation: poorly designed web page titles.
We ran a within-subjects study, testing each user on all 4 reading conditions — printed book, PC, iPad, and Kindle — rotating the sequence in which we exposed users to each device.
via iPad and Kindle Reading Speeds (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox).
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.
via Usability of iPad Apps and Websites: First Research Findings.
The first crop of iPad user apps revived memories of Web designs from 1993, when Mosaic first introduced the image map that made it possible for any part of any picture to become a UI element. As a result, graphic designers went wild: anything they could draw could be a UI, whether it made sense or not.
via iPad Usability: First Findings From User Testing Jakob Nielsens Alertbox.
Tags: usability