Kindle Fire Usability Findings

Mobile web sites work best on the 7-inch tablet. Users had great trouble
touching the correct items on full sites, where UI elements are too small
on the Fire screen.

Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox for December 5:
  > http://www.useit.com/alertbox/kindle-fire-usability.html

----------------------------------

Usability Week 2011/2012 conference

  * Las Vegas: this week
  * New York City: Feb. 26 – March 2
  * Edinburgh, Scotland: March 19-23
  * Amsterdam, The Netherlands: April 23-27

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

----------------------------------

TABLET USABILITY

TabTimes interviewed me about our Kindle and iPad testing:
  > http://bit.ly/sOgHLH

----------------------------------

BROWSER USAGE STATISTICS

Firefox released statistics for a 7-day period of use across 117,000
browser users in 2010:

  > http://heatmap.mozillalabs.com

The findings are not that surprising, but it's nice to see newer data
confirming older statistics. Some observations:

  (*) The "Back" button is the second-most used feature after scrolling.
On average it's used 15 times per day. As I have said since 1999, don't
break the Back button:
  > http://www.useit.com/alertbox/990530.html

  (*) Users scroll a fair amount, 46 times per day in the vertical
(up-down) dimension. Horizontal scrolling remains unpopular. On average
users perform a horizontal scroll action (scrollbar or scroll arrows) 0.7
times per day. Vertical scrolling is done 66 times as much.
  > http://www.useit.com/alertbox/scrolling-attention.html
  > http://www.useit.com/alertbox/horizontal-attention.html

  (*) Scrolling down is performed 5.9 times as often as scrolling back up.
Most of the time, once users scroll past something, it's *gone*.

  (*) New Tab is used dramatically more than New Window: 4.2 times per day
vs. 0.01 times.

  (*) There's more bookmarking than I had expected: 0.7 per day, or 257
times per year. Clearly users must also delete a lot of bookmarks, or
their bookmark menus will quickly become unwieldy.

  (*) Esoteric commands are hardly ever used. For example, the RSS button
is used every 140 days on average (2.6 times per year).