UK Election Email Newsletters Rated

Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox for April 26 is now online at:
  > http://www.useit.com/alertbox/uk-email-newsletters.html
		
Summary:
The main British parties' email newsletters have higher usability scores
than we found for US political newsletters in our last evaluation.
			
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Usability Week 2010 conference

  * 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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iPAD USER TESTING

We ran the first usability studies of iPad applications last week. Some
very early findings were presented at our Chicago conference later that
week, but we will have a better-analyzed set of findings ready for the
London Usability Week, mainly in the seminars on iPhone apps and content
usability:

  > http://www.nngroup.com/events/tutorials/mobile_apps.html
  > http://www.nngroup.com/events/tutorials/content_2.html

I found it to be much more difficult to observe user testing of iPad apps
than of iPhone apps.

For one, the early iPad apps have completely WHACKY interaction design, so
that users often have no idea what they did to make something happen.
Worse, we (the study observers) also often had little clue. At least we
were 4 usability experts observing the sessions, so usually one of us
could figure out what had happened.

With a touch screen, you don't get advance notice about where the user is
aiming, the way you do with mouse-driven UIs, where you can watch the
cursor on its way to the spot the user aims to click.

This is not a big problem on the iPhone, because of (a) the smaller screen
and (b) the limited set of interactions. iPhone users mainly employ two
interactions (besides clicking on buttons): scrolling down and zooming
in/out, both of which act on the entire display. But iPad apps often
employ scrolling and/or zooming of sub-panes that can move in multiple
directions, which again is harder to follow for an observer.
	
Don't even get me started on the supposed accessibility feature of tapping
or panning with 3 fingers, which is claimed to help low-vision users read
tiny text. I doubt any 70-year old user will understand the difference
between panning the zoom state (with 3 fingers) and panning the display
state (with 1 finger). For sure, it's hard to follow when watching through
a document camera.

It's harder to test iPad usability, but that doesn't mean that you
shouldn't do it or that it can't be done. You simply need more observers
or more time reviewing the video recordings.

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"TIME" MAGAZINE WRITING STYLE

According to The New Yorker's review of the new biography of Henry Luce
(founder of Time magazine), the original prospectus for Time included this
description of the magazine's writing style:

"Time is interested - not in how much it includes between its covers - but
in how much it gets off its pages into the minds of its readers."

(By now, this is 4th-hand reporting: I am citing a review that cites a
book that cited the prospectus. But I don't pretend to be a historian, so
I'll take this shortcut rather than consult the original source since I'm
only using it for an anecdote anyway.)

It's amazing how closely Time's goal from 1923 matches what I usually
describe as the goal of Web communication: to penetrate users' skulls.
(Too many sites just want to show off and put lots of fancy stuff on the
page that never makes it past the eyeballs and into the mind.)

  > http://www.nngroup.com/events/tutorials/usability_mind.html

So, kudos to Time for having had the right vision early.

Sadly, their new iPad app tested really poorly. But since Time is a weekly
we got to test two version of their app: the second edition tested better.
So it looks like they're learning from their early design mistakes. (It
would have been even better if they'd learned these lessons from usability
testing rather than from making their customers suffer. As I always say,
your design *will* be tested - either in the lab or by your customers.)