Usability on the iPad

Jacob Nielson just wrote a review of iPad app usability.

He talks about the absence of the usual affordances to let you know what you can do - for example a button should look like a button so you know you can push it. And while I agree somewhat I have to say I'm not completely sure. I think everyone is still thinking of the iPad as just a small thin computer but I think that is missing the point. It really is something completely different in the way that a user interacts with it. Everything on the screen is fair game for touching and interacting with. This paradigm may take some getting used to but it is also awfully powerful, and is what makes me believe that this is the start of an entire new era of computing.

Take scrollbars for example. On the iPad scrollbars don't show up. To scroll you just drag your finger down the page and it scrolls. It works remarkably well, and you don't even think that you are scrolling, you just do it. For awhile I was having trouble scrolling inside a subsection of a webpage (a div for those of us who speak HTML). Then I found out that to do this you hold down two fingers to scroll. And after doing it once, it is also now natural and something I will also just do without thinking. So while it took some learning to find out the guesture, it is now just another natural way to work.

I do agree with Jacob about one thing though. There are way too many ways to turn a page in different apps.