Horizontal Attention Leans Left

Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox for April 6 is now online at:
  > http://www.useit.com/alertbox/horizontal-attention.html
		
Summary:
Web users spend 69% of their time viewing the left half of the page and
30% viewing the right half. A conventional layout is thus more likely to
make sites profitable.
			
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Usability Week 2010 conference

  * Chicago, IL: April 19-24
  * London, UK: May 16-21
  * San Francisco, CA: June 14-19
  * Toronto, Canada: August 9-14

Full program:
  > http://www.nngroup.com/events

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DEADLINES

Last chance to save $200 on CHICAGO registrations
and 10% on LONDON:
  * Next Friday, April 16

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iPAD EARLY THOUGHTS

We got our hands on some iPads and will be doing user testing of a bunch
of sites and apps next week. Hopefully we can present some usability
findings in two weeks, at the Chicago Usability Week seminars on Content
Usability and Mobile Apps:
  > http://www.nngroup.com/events/tutorials/content_2.html
  > http://www.nngroup.com/events/tutorials/mobile_apps.html

For now, based on our testing of *iPhone* apps, I think it will be a
mistake to use the bigger screen to cram in all the features that will
fit. Touch screen interactions are more awkward than using a "full"
computer with optimized I/O devices: you can point much more precisely
with a mouse.

As a rough, *preliminary* guideline, use the screen space as follows: The
iPad has 5 times as many pixels as the iPhone, so you can have twice as
feature-rich sites/apps as you would on the phone, making each feature 2.5
times bigger (thus easier to operate using fat fingers).

Pundits have criticized the lack of multitasking. While it's certainly
useful to run several apps, it's also distracting. Monotasking may be as
much of a feature as a bug. It will emphasize a more immersive user
experience, with more focused attention to a smaller number of things than
when browsing the desktop Web. Bye, bye surfing.

Emphasizing immersion over distractions supports charging for content,
because deeper info has higher value-add than the superficial in-and-out
hits that characterize most Web use.

A compromise between single- and multi-tasking: when users exit and then
re-enter an app, resume at the point they left, rather than starting from
the beginning.

(These comments are made *without* any data from usability studies, so
take them with a big grain of salt. I may well change my mind once I
observe our upcoming research.)