iPad usability suffers from inconsistent app design
Nielsen Norman Group published a report with research findings on iPad usability that result from testing seven people interacting with different iPad websites and apps.
Websites on the iPad look good, especially considering the web browsing experience on devices with smaller screens like the iPod Touch and the iPhone, but the touch screen interface causes a different class of problems: Read-tap asymmetry. Unless a site is designed with the iPad in mind, the text is big enough to read, but too small to touch. Inline links and navigational menus often offer small targets that make web browsing uncomfortable.
On the other hand, Apple’s conceptual model for the iPad UI design is based on the absence of hardware buttons, cursors, visual cues and standard navigation support that ensure immersiveness and elegance at the expense of usability. Poor interface areas discoverability is the result: Often users don’t perceive the possible actions that can be performed on an app, and interface design consistency is hard to be found.
In fact apps can differ a lot in this sense, for instance touching a picture in different apps can produce so many unpredictable effects that it’s virtually impossible to transfer skills from one app to the next. When you touch a picture and expect to navigate to another page and nothing happens, or instead of getting an enlarged version of the picture, a picture gallery opens, or a navigation menu pops up, the sense of immersiveness is broken as you don’t know what behavior to expect from the app.
Simple gestures used to continue reading an article on magazine apps can lead to different outcomes, navigating out of the “page” opening another article, actually scrolling down the text or producing no effect at all. Accidental activation of other features can occur when users touch active areas by mistake.
NN/g’s study is a must read for iPad app developers. Only through the establishment of user interface design standards, Apple can provide the immediacy and immersiveness of user experience that make the iPad magical.
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