If you don’t want to read the long report, Jakob has written a summarized version of his findings – iPad Usability: First Findings From User Testing

Download the report:
Usability of iPad Apps and Websites: First Research Findings

Table of Contents:

1. Executive Summary
   • First studies
   • Wacky interfaces
   • Inconsistent interaction design
   • Crushing print metaphor
   • Card sharks vs. holy scrollers
   • Toward a better iPad user experience
2. Research Method
3. Websites on the iPad
   • Using full sites on the iPad
   • Using mobile sites on the iPad
   • iPad-specific website?
   • App or website?
4. Mental Models
   • Magazine mental models
   • Modeling a different app
5. Beautiful Images
6. The Touch Screen
   • Small target areas
   • Accidental tapping and the Back button
7. Lack of Affordances: Where Can I Tap?
   • Targets that do not look like targets
   • Invisible controls
   • No hyperlinks
8. Getting Lost in an Application
   • The home button
   • The search box
   • Tabs and the iPad’s tab bar
   • Navigation panel on the left
   • Carousels
9. Changing Orientation
10. An Abundance of Gestures
    • Gestures that are too complex
    • Memory for gestures
11. Multiple Panels
    • Small font size and crowded content
    • Lower working memory burden
    • Disconnect between action and feedback
12. Methodology

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Video from: http://www.CS5.org

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Color Theory for Designers, Part 1: The Meaning of Color

Color in design is very subjective. What evokes one reaction in one person may evoke a very different reaction in somone else. Sometimes this is due to personal preference, and other times due to cultural background.

Color Theory For Designers, Part 2: Understanding Concepts And Terminology

If you’re going to use color effectively in your designs, you’ll need to know some color concepts and color theory terminology. A thorough working knowledge of concepts like chroma, value and saturation is key to creating your own awesome color schemes.

Color Theory for Designer, Part 3: Creating Your Own Color Palettes

Here we’ll be talking about methods for creating your own color schemes, from scratch. We’ll cover the traditional color scheme patterns (monochrome, analogous, complementary, etc.) as well as how to create custom schemes that aren’t based strictly on any one pattern.

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10/GUI from C. Miller on Vimeo.

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HTC Quietly Brilliant

HTC has a new brand positioning called “Quietly Brilliant”. In fact, HTC seems to be getting the fact that a mobile device is now ubiquitous in everyday life. A few people asked me what I thought when I heard the new branding “Quietly Brilliant”, and going back to my British English roots, I declared out loud, “Brilliant!”. Not so quiet after all.

“Quietly Brilliant” really embodies the philosophy of an ubiquitous lifestyle where a mobile phone just does great and brilliant things while being all natural, behind-the-scenes and “quiet” about it. This very much follows what User Experience (UX) geeks have been trying to achieve all along. Will HTC be able to achieve this ubiquitous stage of Zen? In order to follow through with this new branding, and their “YOU” campaign, they must first look back at what they have achieved, improve their existing ubiquitous technology, and bring it to the next level.

Their existing TouchFlo 3D has brought Windows Mobile phones up one level, emerging as a unique phone above every device. Their new HTC Sense UI for Android phones has given new meaning to how one perceives an Android phone. My recent foray into the HTC Hero has satiated my need for a mobile device that suits my lifestyle, yet discovered that HTC Sense still requires a lot of work. My hope is that HTC follows suit to their new “Quietly Brilliant” branding and develop both the HTC Sense UI and HTC TouchFlo 3D beyond what it is today.

HTC, going forward and strengthening your branding, my humble word of advice: Hire more UX experts and invest your time on making your technology “Just Work”.

Below are the marketing campaign videos for this new “YOU” campaign that will hopefully be a series of campaigns surrounding this new “Quietly Brilliant” brand.

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Universal Principles of Design: 100 Ways to Enhance Usability, Influence Perception, Increase Appeal, Make Better Design Decisions, and Teach Through Design, by William Lidwell, Kritina Holden, and Jill Butler (buy in the U.S. or buy in the U.K.)
As the title says: a description of a hundred basic principles of usability and design. Few of these will be new to you, but it’s good to have them collected in one place with simple description and a few illustrative examples of each principle. Serves as a nice checklist to read through as you are thinking about the usability of a design problem. For example, one technique is “highlighting”: the book gives the guideline to highlight no more than 10% of the information and lists five common ways to highlight (bold, different typeface, color, inverting, and blinking). Reading this short description may give rise to the following questions about your design: Did we highlight something that users should be directed to give special attention? Did we highlight too much? Did we use the best highlighting technique for the context, or should we use one of the others?

The Design of Everyday Things, by Don Norman (buy in the U.S. or buy in the U.K.)
This book is the best introduction to the importance of usability in design: much of the value comes from the fact that it is not about computers but about all kinds of other things that we suffer from every day (even nerds can identify with the examples in this book, though they usually claim that “well, typing mumble-foo-META-F4 is not that hard to remember” when confronted with an example of bad user interface design). This is the paperback edition. The hardcover edition was entitled The Psychology of Everyday Things, leading to the often-cited acronym POET. The two editions are the same despite the different titles.

Emotional Design: Why We Love (Or Hate) Everyday Things, by Donald A. Norman (buy in the U.S. or buy in the U.K.)
Don Norman presents his theory of the three levels at which people engage with designs: visceral, behavioral, and reflective. Many traditional appearance designers have focused on the visceral level, usability has traditionally been strongest at the behavioral level, and many marketing experts have focused on the branding aspects of reflective design (while ignoring other angels of how people think about their personal history of using products). Norman brings it all together in a unified theory of design. The book is the most useful for readers who are designing physical objects where the visceral level has more dimensions to work with and where users also get more time to engage the reflective level. Web design is more dominated by the behavioral level, but the other two certainly matter as well.

Usability Engineering, by Jakob Nielsen (revised paperback edition). Buy from Amazon USA or buy from Amazon U.K.
Basic textbook that covers the entire usability engineering lifecycle from early product conceptualization through design and evaluation to field installation and follow-up studies. This book focuses on the practical methods that can be applied at each step with a particular emphasis on “discount usability engineering” methods that can be used despite the most severe deadlines and budget restraints. The full table of contents is online

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1. Know your user
2. Pay attention to patterns
3. Stay consistent
4. Use visual hierarchy
5. Provide feedback
6. Be forgiving
7. Empower your user
8. Speak their language
9. Keep it simple
10. Keep moving forward

There you have it. 10 fundamentals of User Interface Design.

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The 1st game was “Spot the difference” of two pictures of Da Vinci’s Last Supper (Faster). The 2nd game were to solve anagrams, and they were focused on security keywords (Smarter). The last game was to create an egg catcher out of scraps (Safer).

After all the games, the actual event commenced, with Effendy Ibrahim first up, followed by David talking about Norton’s new technology in Norton 2010.

The last time I used a Norton product was many years back, and the impression I had was that Norton was a very resource-hogging, cpu-intensive, clunky and annoying huge piece of junk that takes over your computer, decreasing your computer’s performance and usability, including increasing boot-time.

That was all in the past. In Norton 2010, they focused on making it light on memory – using only just 10MB at idle, faster scanning speeds, fewer intrusive popups, increases boot time by only a little, and installs under 1 minute. But the most impressive technology that separates Norton from the rest of the other security suites is an additional new level of security, codenamed Quorum, that essentially uses the concept of “Crowdsourcing” to discover any new malware that isn’t already in the database of malware signatures. Quorum uses the opinions of the masses to determine the “reputation” of a certain file based on some statistical algorithm which allows Norton 2010 to determine whether if a file should be denied or allowed based on this “reputation”. This allows faster and quicker propagation of malware discovery, allowing it to determine a new malware within an average 1 hour. This is just the tip of the iceberg for Quorum. There are many other ideas in the works that makes use of this concept, like being able to determine whether a particular application is unstable or will crash your system, and various other interesting ideas for quick propagation of information regarding a certain application.

Another technology, System Insight, is useful for technically-inclined users (friends and family of the technically-inclined). The constant performance monitoring of applications allows these users to correlate poor performance with activity on the PC, including new downloads and installs. This will enable users to figure out (for friends and family) what exactly is slowing down their computer and remove or mitigate the cause.

In terms of the User Interface, and the toolbar, I’m not impressed with the space-eating toolbar, and the gratuitous animation which does not bring any additional value at all to the user. Thank goodness it isn’t an often used feature. If Norton needs some recommendations with UX, look me up and I’ll recommend several great UX gurus. Installing toolbars and taking over precious real-estate space on your screen, especially when netbooks are becoming popular, isn’t really the way to go. Random fancy, gratuitous animation just because it looks cool does NOT add any value to the user experience, but might even slow down the animation performance on slower computers. It is the epitome of BAD user interface design. With that said, I’m pretty impressed with how they represented System Insight and performance monitoring in a timeline, which is something that actually make sense.

Other than that, I am pretty impressed with the improvements they have made in terms of speed, and memory resources. With regards to the event, it was great and enjoyable. Enjoy the photos below.

Some additional interesting read of Gratuitous Animations and Design:

Using WPF for Good and Not Evil
Effective Motion Graphics and Animation
Gratuitous Graphics and Human-Centered Website Design

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The Usability Marathon 2009 will consist of a series of free online webinars. The webinars are scheduled according to Moscow time; however the online format enables participants from all over the world to attend.

Each guest speaker is an exceedingly experienced international professional from countries including the United States, Germany, Australia, and China. They are leaders in user experience, usability research and interaction design, authors of popular books and publications, participants in the largest conferences, or chief consultants and directors of UX companies.

The Marathon audience is both experienced and novice usability and UX specialists, interaction designers, developers, project managers, UX team leaders and managers of companies developing digital products and services.

Registration for the webinars is now open at the event’s website: http://marathon.uidesign.ru

I’ll be attending most of the online webinars, but for those interested, these are the few in particular I think will be great:

Selling UX
Daniel Szuc | Apogee, Hong Kong, China

Imagine we need to sell UX to an organization. Not all organizations have the same level of interest and receptiveness to UX. Some just don’t care.

What should we know about an organization that will help us sell UX more effectively? What sort of questions should we ask about the organization, its people and its culture? What can we learn from organizations where UX has become part of the corporate DNA? What factors can increase our chances of promoting UX successfully to an organization now and in the future?

This presentation will tap into more than 10 years of experience in selling UX into different markets and organizations. We will share the successes, pitfalls and failures.

UX Vision, Strategy and Teams
Susan Wolfe | Optimal Experience, Australia

Many organizations try to apply user experience (UX) expertise and best practice principles to their design and development processes. However, when done as discrete activities on particular projects, it is rarely yields a truly satisfying result in the end. To be successful, an overall UX vision must first be established for the organization, and a strategy for realizing that vision must be developed. It’s only then that the organization stands a chance to create a single, consistent face to its customers.

The challenges of doing so are many, including creating the vision and then enabling different groups such as product development, marketing and customer service to deliver on that common vision. During the webinar, Susan will draw upon her extensive experience as well as the result of surveys with successful user-centered design and UX teams worldwide to share practical approaches to creating and implementing such a strategy.

Measuring User Efficiency
Jeff Sauro | Oracle, USA

How long does it take to complete a task? Obtaining task time metrics is important for benchmarking and improving the efficiency of an interface. Conducting summative usability tests to gather these metrics is expensive and usually comes too late in the development cycle to make changes. Using a modification of Keystroke Level Modeling Jeff will show how to accurately estimate experienced users task times using only screen shots and prototypes.

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