Jakob Nielsen’s Findings on iPad Application Usability

Jacob Nielsen, one of the foremost practitioners of Usability Testing and author of several excellent texts on the subject, has taken a first stab at studying the usability of iPad applications and posted his results as the April 26, 2010 article of Alertbox, his online column about usability.  His conclusions, unfortunately, suggest that despite the hype the user experience on the iPad is far from ideal:

Summary: iPad apps are inconsistent and have low feature discoverability, with frequent user errors due to accidental gestures. An overly strong print metaphor and weird interaction styles cause further usability problems.

I’m not terribly surprised by these results – as he says at the top of his article, an iPad user interface shouldn’t be a scaled-up iPhone UI, and yet, probably because it’s the easiest approach to take for application developers who wanted to convert iPhone apps over, it is what the majority of iPad apps exhibit. Hopefully, as time goes on, both Apple and the i* application development community will take note of the differences between the two form factors and the iPad OS and the applications on it will move towards an interface that is more usable at the larger iPad scale.

:-j(enni)

Blogging about DotNetNuke User Experience

My new employer, DotNetNuke Corporation is big on community given that the product started as and continues to be driven by open source development principles. I've been asked to start a blog on the company site where I can discuss User Experience issues and initiatives related to the DotNetNuke platform and share interesting news and useful information related to the field of User Experience.

Since I already have this "professional" blog I decided I would keep it going but focus it on more general UX news and info while the new one will focus on DNN specific UX items. I expect I'll cross post a lot of items from this blog over there but will only cross post from there to here if the post covers a fairly general UX topic with a fairly minor reference to DNN (e.g.: perhaps DNN is used as an example).

:-j(enni)

Back Among the Ranks of the Gainfully Employed

Yay for me! I started today as the User Interface Developer for DotNetNuke Corporation today – a small company managing a Web Content Management Server application also called DotNetNuke (DNN) written for ASP.NET and SQL Server.  There’s a marked similarity to NCompass Labs in its early days, so I kind of feel like I’m going back to my roots (I started at NCompass as a "Demo Programmer" writing "smoke and mirrors UI" code in VB which sat on top of the alpha-product code and emulated the planned behaviour to be used at Trade Shows and to attract Investor interest.

DNN is actually an open source project and there is a basic version of the software available for download free of charge and it can be installed against Microsoft SQL Server Express which is also a free download. The Professional version of the software has a subscription cost associated with it (which is what "monetizes" DNN) and provides customers with full technical support, end user and administrator documentation, and several features that are unavailable to the free version.

Because the product is open source its evolution has mainly been dominated by the predilections and preferences of developers and therefore had only a minimum of focus on usability and interaction design. DNN Corp was looking for someone with skills as a user experience designer and a front-end developer – that is, someone with the background to provide design requirements and user centered design processes to the product while also being able to produce shippable UI code based on these designs. So, my new role will actually be split between User Experience design and Front-End Development and this has me really excited because it means making full use of the development skills I renewed by earning my Programmer Analyst/Web Developer Diploma (with Honours!) last year.

I’m pretty excited – my first day went quite well – and I’m certainly looking forward to tomorrow and beyond.

:-j(enni)

Looking for UX work again...

Yes, I’m back on the job hunter trail again. My previous employer was a start up and they have used up too much of their funding before getting to a point where new investors could be attracted. So they laid off the entire development team on Dec 21, 2009, ostensibly for a “6 week development break” – they have a plan to attract new investment with the existing product and then re-hire the dev team Feb 1, 2010.

Unfortunately, I have my doubts about them being able to land more investment under the circumstances – there are too many issues with the product, mostly due to a lack of adequate design and development processes resulting from the dev team being given extremely short, date driven deadlines with an excessively large feature scope expectation.  In fact, although I was hired as a Usability Manager, the time given was so tight I found myself being a glorified interaction designer, with no opportunity to develop UX requirements documents or do appropriate user research to base my work on.

Anyway, I don’t think I’m going back even if they do find more investors – after some offline conversations with the CEO it seems we have a difference of opinion about what a Usability Manager should be doing. It seems he wants someone who can show him a “Usability Vision” for the product. I’m not entirely sure what he meant by that, but it is presumably a complete vision of how the application should look and how the interaction should flow, but before there has been any chance to obtain stakeholder consensus or do any user research. :P

sigh.  Such an unsatisfactory situation. For the health of my career I guess I should just wash my hands of them.

If there's anyone out there seeking someone for an upper level, hands on role (i.e., not management alone) in user experience design or an intermediate level role in web, multimedia or game design and/or front-end development, please let me know! I’m particularly interested in permanent positions but will consider contracts of 3 months or longer, especially if they are contract-to-hire.

:-j(enni)