Example Of Use Of Gestures In Ipads Case Study

The applications of iPads are not consistent and are characterized by low feature discoverability, having regular user errors brought about by accidental gestures. To proceed reading once the user reach the bottom of the screen, three dissimilar gestures are needed. They include scrolling down,, swiping left and swiping up gestures. For the scrolling down gesture, users have to guess what text can be scrolled given that text field are not demarcated on the screen. Therefore, the user has to touch inside the text field for the scrolling down gesture to function. The swiping down gesture does not work except under specific conditions. In addition, the gestures are also essentially short-lived and hard to learn when not used consistently across applications due to low memorability. There is also accidental activation which takes place when the user of iPad happen to touch something by mistake or make a gesture that surprisingly or unpredictably initiates a feature. As a result of all these, it is apparent that users feel dissatisfied and discontented about the gestures in iPads (Nielsen, Norman & Tognazzini, 2011)

How users feel about the user input when it comes to filling out complicated forms on the iPad.

Although iPad user interfaces have become less weird with time (Nielsen, Norman & Tognazzini, 2011), filling complicated forms can be very time consuming and tedious for the user due to the limited and small keyboards although many current Smartphone with virtual keyboards have browsers that can recognize the type of content required for the text field and then bring up an optimized keyboard for the type of input which can be used to simplify typing information (Löfholm & Eriksson, 2012).

Usability of back buttons and thumbnails on the iPad

With applications that lack back buttons are characterized by events like accidental activation due to unintended touches which causes trouble. There is still the worst case where users do not know how to revert to the previous state due to lack of consistent undo command feature to offer an escape hatch like the back button of the web. This means lack of flexibility when using such applications.. the long list of thumbnails have lower usability as compared to homepage which users can easily return to in order to navigate to various locations instead of just proceeding with the next article. It also implies that the usability of back buttons is still low although iPad has improved in terms of general usability (Nielsen, Norman & Tognazzini, 2011).
Features end users liked and disliked, and speculate about the reasons for their responses.The likes feature: Most users have the impression that desktop iPad is beautiful, that is, good looking in terms of appearance. The iPads also has bigger screen which provides reasonable usability for regular web page users. However, users tend to dislike iPad features such as read-tap asymmetry where text that is big enough to read appears too small to touch. Some of the reasons why users may respond in this manner is that the good features which they like such as bigger iPad screen enables them to enjoy using web pages perhaps to increased visibility of the text on the screen. On the other hand, the features they dislike make it hard for them to effectively use iPads in accordance with their preference and expectation (Nielsen, Norman & Tognazzini, 2011).

My overall likes and dislikes of the iPad usability and its features.

I particularly like the portability part of iPad as well as the ability of several websites to be used fairly well with iPads. There is also improved interface design which continues to get better with time as technology advances. However, I dislike the idea of iPad interfaces suffering triple threat that brings about considerable user confusion in terms of usability problems such as low discoverability, low memorability and accidental activation. Other dislikes include lack of standard back button features for navigation purposes in addition to features that make text too small to touch on the screen (Nielsen, Norman & Tognazzini, 2011).

References

Löfholm, K., & Eriksson, D. (2012). Designing User Interfaces for Mobile Web.
Jacob Nielson, Don Norman & Bruce Tog Tognazzini.(2011). Tablet website and application UX