Yes, new technologies require new methods, but the refusal to follow well-tested, well-established principles leads to usability disaster.
Recently, Raluca Budui and Hoa Loranger from the Nielsen Norman group performed usability tests on Apple’s iPad reaching much the same conclusion. The new applications for gestural control in smart cellphones (notably the iPhone and the Android) and the coming arrival of larger screen devices built upon gestural operating systems (starting with Apple’s iPad) promise even more opportunities for well-intended developers to screw things up. Nielsen put it this way: “The first crop of iPad apps revived memories of Web designs from 1993, when Mosaic first introduced the image map that made it possible for any part of any picture to become a UI element. As a result, graphic designers went wild: anything they could draw could be a UI, whether it made sense or not. It’s the same with iPad apps: anything you can show and touch can be a UI on this device. There are no standards and no expectations.” (…)
There are several important fundamental principles of interaction design that are completely independent of technology:
- Visibility (also called perceived affordances or signifiers)
- Feedback
- Consistency (also known as standards)
- Non-destructive operations (hence the importance of undo)
- Discoverability: All operations can be discovered by systematic exploration of menus
- Scalability. The operation should work on all screen sizes, small and large.
- Reliability. Operations should work. Period. And events should not happen randomly.
All these are rapidly disappearing from the toolkit of designers, aided, we must emphasize, by the weird design guidelines issued by Apple, Google, and Microsoft.
Źródło: Don Norman’s jnd.org – GESTURAL INTERFACES: A STEP BACKWARDS IN USABILITY.
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