I’ve installed The Guardian’s new Wordpress plug-in on this blog, and this is my first try at publishing a FULL Guardian article. Bravo to The Guardian for having the vision to push its content out in this way and leverage the power of letting go and turning the Web outside of its walled garden into a revenue opportunity. To the rest of the legacy news media: TAKE NOTE! -Steve
This article was written by Jack Schofield, for guardian.co.uk on Wednesday 2nd June 2010 13.07 UTC
Apple’s iPad has usability problems, and shows an “overemphasis on aesthetics”, according to usability guru Dr Jakob Nielsen, who has just published a free 93-page report on iPad usability. He was in London last month where his company, Nielsen Norman Group, was holding a usability conference. Since he had an iPad in his hotel room, I asked him how well it had turned out.
“In some ways, less well than I expected,” he said. “There were really a lot of usability problems in this first-generation of iPad applications. It’s often quite difficult for people to discover what they have to do because the options are not very visible. I have to say of both the device itself and the content, it’s very attractive, which is good. But at the same time, overemphasising the attractiveness and hiding the functionality, that does cause problems.”
Nielsen also thinks “there are things Apple has done that diminish usability. For example, they don’t have some standard things like font size control so you can define big, small or medium text. With no font preferences, every designer can do a picture-perfect layout on every screen, because they don’t have to reflow the text accordingly, which is what websites should always do,” he says.
“The second compounding issue is that everything is different. If you pick up a few different magazine apps, every one of them will treat the articles and pictures differently. How do you go to the next article? It’s different in each application, the problem being that then you can’t learn.
“When it comes to reading a magazine, the interest should come from the content, not the interface to that content. You don’t want to have to struggle with ‘how does this work?’ I don’t think [Apple] have detailed-enough guidelines, which partly comes from them pushing it out too quickly.”
But, I reply, surely people are used to dealing with different applications on the web.
“They are, but they also don’t like that!” Nielsen says. “But I think the web has by now evolved a fairly large set of conventions, so it’s relatively well known how to deal with basic things.” For example, with a long article you can either scroll or sometimes click for the next page. “You can certainly do it differently, but any website that does it differently will have problems.”
Nielsen says that some of the iPad’s problems are endemic to the touch tablet format. “With the iPad, it’s very easy to touch in the wrong place, so people can click the wrong thing, but they can’t tell what happened,” he says. There are also problems with gestures such as swiping the screen because they’re “inherently vague”, and “lack discoverability”: there’s no way to tell what a gesture will do at any particular point.
“People don’t know what they can do, and when they try to do something, they don’t even know what they did, because it’s invisible,” Nielsen explains. “With a mouse, you can click the wrong thing, but you can see where you clicked.”
Lack of consistency and lack of discoverability are problems that should worry Apple, because they have been its strength for decades. Discoverability was the core attraction of the Mac’s pull-down menus when it was launched in 1984, and the main reason Apple opted for having only one button on the mouse. “One of the great successes of the Macintosh was that it had very detailed human-interface guidelines for how applications should work,” says Nielsen. “In those days, as a Mac owner, you could pick up another application and just use it, whereas as a PC owner, if you bought another application, it was another user interface – completely different.”
So does he have a view on the Adobe Flash versus HTML5 bun-fight, because Flash isn’t generally known for its usability.
“For once, I’m on the side of Flash,” he says, “because I think Apple is trying to over-rigidly control what’s on its devices. I can understand there are benefits to doing that, but there are also benefits to the diversity of the internet. Diversity is a very powerful mechanism. In the early days of the web, there were many alternatives that were closed services – AOL, CompuServe, Trilogy – but on the web, anybody could put up anything, including a lot of bad stuff. But users vote with their feet, or their clicks: they can click away from bad Flash and click towards good Flash. It’s a shame Apple is so restrictive on what they allow on the iPad and the iPhone. When a customer has bought a device, it’s theirs; they should be able to see the information they want, and run the applications they want.”
Nielsen adds: “Flash has been quite often mis-used to cause grievances in the user interface. That said, it has also been used in later years for more useful things, such as video. In my view, there’s no real need to change to another technology once we have one that works pretty well. But Apple doesn’t seem to like Adobe, I guess, so they’re pushing that we should change to HTML5. But from the user perspective, which is what I’m trying to advocate, it doesn’t make that much difference. Technically, it doesn’t really matter.”
But don’t we all expect HTML5 to win in the end?
“Five years from now, it’s likely that HTML5 will be a better way of doing video – it’s a very good long-term trend – but that doesn’t mean you should throw out all the existing stuff now,” says Nielsen. “You have to be able to read old formats.” Not everything gets updated.
Of course, I say, another part of the iPad’s appeal to publishers is that they can charge for content that would otherwise be free on the web.
“The one thing we’re still missing is a great business model for content providers,” says Nielsen, “and the iPad gets people to buy magazines by downloading apps. It’s really a sort of midi-payment rather than a micropayment because you’re still buying an aggregation of material in one go. I actually still believe more in micropayments, where you pay for individual things. Micropayments haven’t taken off. It’s one of those areas that has to be fairly centralised: there really has to be one system.”
Microsoft has done it with points on Xbox Live, for one example, so could Facebook do it for the wider web?
“Maybe they could, and they could seed it very well by allowing you earn points from different things you do on their system,” he says. “When they needed to get a critical mass of customers, PayPal gave you for signing up. Facebook could give you the opportunity to gain some points by updating your profile. But they’re trying too hard to leverage friend connections, and almost anything you do to make money off who’s a friend of who will be a privacy violation.”
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010
The other, smaller package of (single-color) coupons was from one of the grocery stores I shop at: King Soopers. Because the King Soopers chain offers member discount cards, the company’s databases have lots of data on what I’ve bought from its stores; you pretty much have to use the cards (or enter your phone number as an alternate ID at the check-out), or else you pay significantly more by missing all the in-store sale prices.
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