To be fair, iPad is a good product idea. The scenarios make sense and it’s a logical extension of the iPhone. There should be a market for it and I believe Apple will make some good profit given the marginal investment required. The bottom line is, it’s just a bigger iPhone. It’s not a revolutionary device that’s drawing us closer to the e-paper vision (think Harry Potter) or whatever hype the media have been generating.

The Daily Prophet in Harry Potter

As a tablet device guru, I dream of a device that will one day take a good share of the duty out of the paper and becomes a prominent medium that sits in between the computer screen and physical paper.

Tablet PC pushed the limit of the digitizer and inspired various form factors; Kindle popularized electronic ink display with a lightweight, low-heat device; while iPad contributed close to nothing.

To get the full picture, let’s look at the most successful medium in the world:  paper

Good:

• Extremely light-weight
• Readability (reflecting light instead of emitting light, contrast ratio)
• Support read & write
• Cheap
• Easy to expand to multiple displays

Bad:

• Static content only
• Hard to duplicate or transfer
• Hard to edit/modify the content
• Can only scale to a few hundred pages of content. Beyond that, it’s too heavy to be mobile.

Tablet PC solved a lot of these problems, some of which only half way, and also introduced new problems:

• It’s hot, thick, and heavy, compared to paper.
• The interaction (typing, browsing) feels awkward, compared to keyboard, mouse and real pen.

I was hoping iPad would address at least some of these big, challenging problems, but it didn’t.

It’s still thick and heavy, relatively speaking. I haven’t used it yet but I expect it to get hot overtime. The way you type on it is through a virtual, non-textile keyboard, which I expect to be a pain (Steve Jobs said it’s like a dream to type on it. I think it’s BS.). Beyond which I haven’t seen any interaction technique introduced. It still uses a LED display, which means your eyes get sore quickly like reading from a computer screen.

From Steve Jobs’ demo, it also looks like you are stuck with some awkward screen size and will have to pan & zoom around in order to browse a larger web page. I don’t know how you can call this the best browsing experience ever.

In short, iPad is a new product, not an innovation. I was expecting innovation.

Oh, and how embarrassing it was to see the lack of Flash support at Steve’s demo. Really?

My notes do assume some prior knowledge of usability (just a little). So if you like what you are reading here, but eithe 1) is intrigued but don’t fully understand or 2) want to get more details, then go buy the book. It’s worth it.

Ch.1 Don’t Make Me Think

• Every question mark in user’s head adds cognitive load. Minimize these question marks by making everything on your page “self-evident”. Users should just get it.
• If self-evident is not possible, at least make it self-explanatory.

Ch.2 How We Really Use the Web

• We don’t read. We scan.
• We satisfice instead of making the optimal choices
  • I.e. Users take the first thing they find adequate and give it try. Worst case they’ll hit the Back button. The risk is low.

Ch.3 Design the site like a BILLBOARD

• Clear visual hierarchy
• Use conventions
• Break pages up to consumable chunks (chunking)
• Make it obvious what’s clickable
• Minimize noise (things that would distract users from what you want them to pay attention to)

Ch.4 Why Users Like Mindless Choices

• It doesn’t matter how many times I have to click, as long as each click is a mindless, unambiguous choice.
  • [Joseph]: I don’t think this applies to any productivity apps.
• Users like “muddling through”

Ch.5 Omit needless words

• Happy talk must die
• Instructions must die

Ch.6 Design Site Navigation

• Search or Browse?
• Get the taxonomy right.
  • This is especially important for “link-dominant” users
  • There are also search-dominant users.
• Web experience lacks the physical cues we have when navigating in real life (direction, scale…etc). Imagine a city without street signs. Therefore website should provide cues such as “breadcrumb”.
• Navbar should be persistent & present on almost every page
• Every page needs a name, and displays the name in the right place
• “You are here” dot. Let users know where they are in your maze.
• Tabs are great
• Web Nav Acid Test
  • What site is this?
  • What page am I on?
  • What are the major sections of this site?
  • What are my options at this level?
  • Where am I?
  • How can I Search?

Ch.7 Design the Home Page

• Essential
  • Site identity & tagline (purpose, what is this site for?)
  • Site hierarchy
  • Search
• Pulldown is no good for things that…
  • Users are not familiar with
  • Not alphabetically known
  • Or a list that’s simply too long

Ch.8 Making Decisions

• The antidote for religious debates = testing
  • You need to build some version of the thing and test it out.
  • There is no substitute for it.

Ch.9 Usability Testing

• Focus groups aren’t usability tests
• Do small tests (3-4 users) frequently (instead of big test infrequently)
  • Amount of findings diminishes with big N
  • Product teams can’t fix that many issues at once anyways
  • Debrief on the same day
• In many cases you can just recruit anyone with reasonable computer experience
• Review the result right away
• Don’t throw a new design out right away due to negative result. Many times a minor adjustment will make a big difference.
• Spend time to test one morning a month is all it takes.

Ch. 10 UX Goodwill

• Think of “Goodwill” as a metric. It goes up and down as users go through your site. If it drops too low, they will leave.

Ch. 11 Accessibility

• First, fix the usability problems that confuse everyone, not just the disabled.
• Thou shall read an article titled “Guidelines for Accessible and Usable Web Sites” by Mary Theofanos and Janice Redish.

Ha, let me guess what you are doing now. Are you staring at my blog and spotting things that don’t follow the rules mentioned above?

Well, some of them are actually by-design, meaning I don’t completely agree with Krug and I make things the way they are intentioanlly. However, the majority of my usability bugs are left active because of time constraint.

I could spend 10 hours customizing my WordPress template, or I can spend time writing more useful posts for you. I chose the later :)

Gotta admit I’m biased toward white Aerospoke’s. Anytime when it’s paired with good colored frames, I would subconsciously add a few points to the bike.

It’s hard to tell from the picture but it’s got a crazy stance. The front wheel is about 5″ smaller than the rear, and the rear triangle is much smaller than usual.

Riding this bike must feel like wearing high heels…but on the other hand it probably makes skidding a lot easier on this fixie.

Came across this neat hyperlink map the other day.

This map is used by a Japanese bike component distributor to list its retail bike shops. Each block represents a prefecture, and the table below the map updates as you click through the blocks.

A post about a novel keyboard caught my attention a couple days ago. It’s got a cutey name that I like: Crocodile Keyboard.

Most discussion so far have been around whether Apple would adopt this design for its ubiquitous iPhone. However, little attention has been given to its real performance and I don’t think any discussion on adoption can be meaningful without answering the performance question first.

The inventor said this keyboard has a bigger “dead space” to prevent the users from pressing the neighboring keys unintentionally. This might be a favorable argument for a physical keyboard design, which is tactile, but not so much for a virtual keyboard.

Not registering a tap in the dead space can be more annoying than getting the wrong character. So ultimately the implementation has to honor a tap in the dead space and interpret it as the key closest to the coordinate.

Now the remaining magic lies in the visual presentation. You give users a smaller visual target to aim to enforce higher accuracy, but this is going to harm the performance based on the beloved Fitts’s Law.

There is an accuracy v. speed tradeoff here. Users will notice that they are slower when typing on the crocodile. When they try to speed up, they’ll start getting more errors like they used to get on the regular virtual keyboard. Assuming the user’s motor skill stays the same, how is typing on the crocodile different from typing on a regular keyboard carefully?

One key question is whether the visual presentation enhances the motor skill that’s guided by it. Perhaps a more plausible version would be, does a stricter target help train the user’s motor skill better over time?

If the result is false, or if the effect is only marginal, then the performance gain will not be substantial enough to expect any commercial interest.

It’s a perfect spot for a picnic. I’ve always wanted to do it, but logistic is a big problem because my race bike has very little cargo space.

Then the opportunity came. I got into touring this year and started putting racks on my commute bike. Staring at these racks reminded me of this picnic spot I’ve always wanted to hit! Besides, before I take any long touring trip, it would be a good idea to test these equipments with a loaded picnic trip.

So here is my trip! and I’ll resort to photos for the rest of this post…

It's quite impressive how everything was held together.

The "touring" conversion was well worth it!

This mini grill fits right onto the rear pannier rack and does a good job grilling our food.

Nope, I did not catch anything...$9 license fee went straight down the drain...

Well, it depends. There are definitely cases where my early thinking stays true. But over the years I find that no matter what your PM methodology is, you can’t get away from spending a phenomenal amount of time and resources if you want to build a world-class software.

Why is that? Well, as your product matures and gets deployed to more people, it will be put into situations that you would never imagine in front of your screen. Everyone has different needs and will praise your product only if it does what they want. (boo otherwise)

So what exactly needs to be considered for a world-class software? Well, I don’t think I can ever come up with an exhaustive list, but here is a sample list that would give you an idea:

Testing, testing, testing

Well, I’m starting the list with an item that’s not a typical design consideration. (design in its narrow sense) But I can’t stress more about the importance of testing, which many start-ups overlook.

Remember Friendster? They were the inventor of Internet social network. They were the one who showed me which friends I have in common with friend X. It was incredibly cool and I would be willing to pay them a subscription fee for the service because of the amount of value they’ve created.

Well, 3 months later, the service starts to become sluggish, my input sometimes gets dropped, and often times you can’t even log on to the web site. This is not a state you want to be in when many others see your success and are ready to make a clone of your idea. If you’ve never heard of Friendster, this is the reason why. They could have be in Facebook’s position today, but the overall bad user experience dragged them down.

Please, test your software. Test it in every aspect I’m listing below and go find more things to test, and make sure it can take all the beating and torture in the real world.

Usability

Is your software considered easy to use by your users? Usability is probably the hottest topic in software these days but often overlooked in practice. World-class software starts usability testing with paper mock-ups before a line of code is written. Treating usability testing as a final thought or as a way to “polish” the product is both costly and ineffective.

Bad usability is frequently observed on iPhone applications. Though Apple published a great usability guide with the iPhone SDK, it’s easy as cake to spot a blatant usability violation. Sometimes I download sketchy apps just to laugh at the poor design ]:->

Here is a great example that I hope you would find entertaining. It’s an app for browsing Craigslist postings, and this is the screen you see when you launch the app.

So…where are the the classified categories? Turns out, the designer assumed a search-based usage so you can’t browse anything until you define a search by clicking on the “+”  button.  (Does this + symbol suggests a search functionality? Not to me.)

Oh, and when you tap on it you get a prompt asking whether you want to Add a New Search before it shows you the actual search form…another trigger for user confusion.

Nope, this app is not world-class.

To be continued…