Hacker Monthly #2 by Netizens Media

Author:Netizens Media [Media, Netizens]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Technology
Publisher: Fifobooks.com

When you combine these three usability problems, the resulting user experience is frequently one of not knowing what happened or how to replicate a certain action to achieve the same result again. Worse yet, people don't know how to revert to the previous state because there's no consistent undo feature to provide an escape hatch like the Web's Back button.

Crushing Print Metaphor

Swiping for the next article is derived from a strong print metaphor in many content apps. In fact, this metaphor is so strong that you can't even tap a headline on the "cover" page to jump to the corresponding article. The iPad offers no homepages, even though users strongly desired homepage-like features in our testing. (They also often wanted search, which was typically not provided.)

In electronic media, the linear concept of "next article" makes little sense. People would rather choose for themselves where to go, selecting from a menu of related offerings.

A strategic issue for iPad user experience design is whether to emphasize user empowerment or author authority. Early designs err on the side of being too restrictive.

Using the Web has given people an appreciation for freedom and control, and they're unlikely to happily revert to a linear experience.

Publishers hope that users will perceive content as more valuable if each publication is a stand-alone environment. Similarly, they hope for higher value-add if users spend more time with fewer publications rather than flit among a huge range of sites like they do on the Web.

Using the desktop Web, a user can easily visit 100 sites in a week, viewing only 1-3 pages on most of them. (For example, for one task in which B2B users visited 15 sites, they spent an average of 29 seconds per pageview.) Most sites are visited once-only, because users dredge them up in a search or stumble upon links from other sites or social media postings. Without real customer relationships, content sites have no value and 90% of the money created by users spending time online accrues to search engines.

The current design strategy of iPad apps definitely aims to create more immersive experiences, in the hope of inspiring deeper attachments to individual information sources. This cuts against the lesson of the Web, where diversity is strength and no site can hope to capture users' sole attention. Frequent user movements among websites has driven the imperative to conform with interface conventions and to create designs that people can use without any learning (or even much looking around). The iPad could be different if people end up getting just a few apps and sticking with them.

Card Sharks vs. Holy Scrollers

UI pioneer Jef Raskin once used the terms card sharks vs. holy scrollers to distinguish between two fundamentally different hypertext models:

• Cards have a fixed-size presentation canvas. you can position your information within this two- dimensional space to your heart's content (allowing for beautiful layouts), but you can't make it any bigger. users have to jump to a new card to get more info than will fit on a single card.

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