I dig the clear hierarchy of the columns and the clean visual quality but I have my questions about how well this approach would play for the majority of Facebook users. (I have a certain affection for MacOS Finder’s column view but I recognize that many people don’t care for it.)

This is one of those interfaces that I’d love to see tested with end users. Interestingly, Facebook is one of those sites (like Amazon) with a large enough user base that an interface like this could get a small scale A-B rollout and remote feedback without causing disruption for the majority of users. Keep the sample small enough and the test might not appear as an article on Mashable until you’ve done a couple rounds.

What do you think of this design approach?

How would your Facebook friends react to it?

It’s not surprising that Lapin’s daughter, who’s already familiar with the iPhone, was able to make a nearly effortless switch from iPhone to iPad. By design the device interfaces are nearly identical. A win for iPad, but a predictable one.

The juicy stuff lives in Lapin’s daughter’s side comments and the areas where she gets stuck in the interaction. In these areas the responses of a young child prove just as useful as those from the most sophisticated participant in a user study.

Has videos?

Indeed it does. I’m guessing that this expectation comes out of her iPhone experience but I have no idea if she watched videos on her Dad’s iPhone or not. It would be especially interesting to hear that she hadn’t but that it was a natural expectation of something of that shape and size. Some kind of “it looks kinda like a small tv I can hold” association. Lapin would have to clarify that question on context.

I want the one with the camera

This echoes one of the most frequent criticisms I hear of iPad.

I’m still undecided on where I sit on that count. On one hand, it seems simple enough to provide. The iPhone has one, why can’t they put one in the iPad. On the other it seems to me that taking photos with iPad would be awkward given its large form factor. I’d love to edit photos I’ve taken on a touch screen that big but I’m not sure how comfortable I’d feel taking them with something so big. What I’d really like to do is connect a professional grade camera to an iPad for editing and quick previews.

Unwanted multitouch issues

Apparently this is proving a common problem. While holding the iPad people’s fingers run out of the “frame” area into the active touch area resulting in an unwanted touch on the edge of the screen. While on the Home screen this means that touches on app icons don’t do anything.

This seems simple enough to fix on the home screen. Ignore touches at the edges of the touch sensitive area. But that leaves the situation unsolved for other apps and this is a problem that asks to be solved at the OS or device level rather than in software on an app to app basis.

The trick will be how to resolve the issue to the satisfaction of multiple genres of applications. The implications of the unwanted edge touches are very different for image editing apps than they are for launchers and both of those differ from game interactions.

Touch the cat’s face

This one I find especially golden. Daughter is clearly having trouble opening the animal word game. When she first enters she touches what looks like a button to start the game. She recognizes a button as clickable more quickly than an image of a cat’s face that says “Play” under it.

It’s a reminder that there are reasons that we have button conventions. There are times to break them and times not to. It appears that for 2.5 year old users, buttons get better visual recognition than an image with an instructional caption. The designers took a gamble and for certain users it doesn’t pay off.

Usability feedback… no degree required

More than anything though I need to point to this sample when clients say that their users are too simple to provide valuable usability feedback. Providing useful feedback on usability issues or site or app structure doesn’t require subject matter expertise or knowledge of the business goals for the site or app. That knowledge often gets in the way. At its heart usability testing is about this: real people that use your site or application providing feedback as they use it.

Something so simple a child can do it.

iPad specific answers to the creation challenge are appearing. This video for iMockups places a nice face on these answers.

I feel rather silly that it didn’t occur to me earlier in the game that wireframing would be low hanging fruit for graphical applications on iPad. Fortunately Omni Group and others have. As OmniGraffle is a central tool to my work I’m especially interested to see it develop. Things seem to be progressing well. From iPad or Bust! to a Two weeks later follow up things seem to be progressing well. Hoping to see a working app close to next month’s iPad release.

Imagining how such tools could be used in quick sessions with clients and developers, let’s say I’m warming to the iPad.

There have been varied reactions to the iPad but those that most interest me are those that go beyond Apple’s marketing message of “the iPad is a new thing that will revolutionize computing” and ask “where will this revolution lead?”

An angle I find especially interesting is expressed in Alex Payne’s On the iPad.

What I find most interesting is how he speaks to the side effects that Apple’s choice to keep the iPad closed may have for future engineers. The closed system may result in the loss of that magic moment when a future engineer sees behind the curtain.

To set up the binary: iPad is for users, personal computers are for inventors.

That magic moment where you see how the machine works and the code invites you.

• Invent a better way to do something
• Invent entirely new things that haven’t been done before

These invitations are the reason that many of us became engineers. The concern is that without that moment we’ll lose some of the innovators of the future.

I remember that moment and the effect it had on me, so I’m partial to the concern. But I don’t see that concern playing out in my children’s lives nor am I entirely convinced it will in yours.

In most households, the iPad won’t be the only device. For the short term, where there’s an iPad there’s a personal computer. Where there’s a personal computer, there’s an opportunity for that magic moment. The future will show whether our digital lifestyle future will keep to the closed system or whether forces for openness will prevail.

Another valuable angle is: the binary is a false one.

• Not all invention comes from engineers
• Not everybody needs to get into how the machine works

My Dad would love to have an iPad. He likes computers but the iPad epitomizes the “just show me what I want” approach that he’s hungered for in a computer for a long time. He doesn’t care about command lines or when abstractions leak. He wants his applications to just work. Email, social networks, office documents. Having a device that lets him do that with minimal thinking about installation or configuration would make him very happy and he wouldn’t feel that he’d missed out on anything.

I have a hard time criticizing that as an experience designer. There’s a device coming that’s what he wanted. My internal dialog about “it looks like a giant iPod Touch,” “you don’t actually create anything on this yet,” “there’s no chance to see the man behind the curtain,” these things don’t matter to many people. They just want the thing to work and work as transparently as possible.

The closed system will provide that for many people.

iPad in various respects isn’t what I’d hoped for. I wanted something more open. At this point in time, the closed system is a feature. It lies on those of us who prefer the open system to provide an answer. How will we provide an open system that offers simple installation of applications that get out of users’ way as much as possible.

Pre-release expectations

Talking with friends about the iPad back when we were all still speculating on the name we came across rumors that dashed our early hopes. The tablet would most likely use iPhone OS and the App store as its sole path for software. A closed system.

From there my thinking went to how Apple would differentiate itself from humdrum tablet pc offerings already out there. iPad isn’t entering an empty category, it’s defining a category that’s been poorly executed and marketed up to now. (Remember Macintosh? Same kind of thing.)

How to do it? You focus on what iPhone OS and App store do best:

• Consume media and data
  • Music
  • Video
  • Social media
  • Web
• Small tasks of creation
  • Email
  • Social media

iPad does this and from what the marketing tells me, does it incredibly well. (Gotta love the gap between announcement and real world launch.) Reading about the product left me a bit flat. My impression seeing video of the email app I think they’ve done some very cool things in customizing the built-in apps to a tablet and leverage options that aren’t available in the smaller iPhone form factor.

Digital lifestyle device

A few years back a key piece of Apple’s marketing message was that the Mac and the iPod were products for your digital lifestyle. The Mac served as the hub for this through the iLife applications. Photo albums, home movies, and garage band recording “for the rest of us.”

iPad is by nature a digital lifestyle device. It’s not for coding. It’s not for heavy duty design or video work. It’s for stuff that I would do on my couch while watching TV. It’s for showing stuff off to my friends when we’re talking in the living room.

Given iPad’s digital lifestyle leaning I’m surprised we didn’t see adaptations of all the iLife apps at launch. I can’t help but think that Apple project teams are currently working on iPad specific versions of iMovie and Garage Band. These are use cases tailor made for something less than a laptop but more than an iPhone. (Add camera and mic to the iPad and iMovie just got even better.)

Until Apple or approved third party apps fill this space iPad will miss a key audience. The current iPad will draw people with cool factor, but as many have noted, it’s a device that’s all about consumption. Many of us want to create on our devices and share those creations off-device (and Microsoft, HP, that’s exactly where you strike back against the iPad).

The most touch-native path to letting people create on the iPad is visual. Leverage the visual and audio-focused digital lifestyle applications that have already proven themselves then expand from there. Let me sync my creations to a computer or hard drive on my wireless network without having to use MobileMe and I’ll lay down the coin right now.

My initial reaction was a knee-jerk “well, duh.” Part of this is seeing similar results from other eye tracking studies, but it may be me trusting in assumptions about how people scan pages.

Seeing “common sense” assumptions reinforced by research tends to bring the “well duh” reaction, but the results are important. The evidence makes sure we’re not blindly following plausible or pleasing assumptions… the trick is making sure that our studies are designed to challenge our assumptions.Which isn’t a comment on the [Nielsen study,][study] but a general one. I’m assuming they’ve designed objectively.
[study]: http://www.nngroup.com/events/tutorials/eyetracking.html “Nielsen Norman eyetracking course”

As part of their Apple Turns 30 coverage, CNET’s showcasing photos of the early Lisa and Mac interfaces, courtesy of Bill Atkinson and Andy Hertzfeld.

For a somewhat less garish (though smaller) presentation of those same photos fortified with historical notes goodness, check out Hertzfeld’s “Busy Being Born” article on Folklore.org.

Whichever flavor you choose, it’s a nice look at some of the design decisions as they moved from the Lisa’s early softkey approach to the windowed interface we know and love. And considering the graphics capabilities of most computers at the time, those halftones are quite impressive.

Or more to my mind… how can we most effectively introduce these technologies to users who don’t know what an RSS is, so they can reap the benefits of these great new tools?

I live by my feed reader and my favorite blogs’ feeds, but I doubt that most of my non-designer friends make use of the tools that the more “web 2.0 savvy” use daily. We see amazing possibilities with these new technologies, but how will we present those possibilities to users? Will our presentation help users see how these new tools get them what they want, or will we trip over our excitement over the next big thing?

If you tell me why RSS is great, I’ll think it’s cool, but if you show me how much faster I can get at posts on my favorite blogs and share my own posts (or del.icio.us bookmarks or last.fm charts) with my friends, I’ll love you forever… and actually use this cool new thing.

Or put more eloquently, Designing Against a Degrading Experience.

I stumbled into the design patterns piece of it on del.icio.us Monday, but during my periodic look at mezzoblue, the details became more clear. Not only has Yahoo made available to the public a set of design patterns, but a
UI library and other tools.

Rather than duplicating details here, I’ll pass you to Chad Dickerson’s more detailed summary. (Thanks to flashpoint for the ref to Chad’s words on the user interface library.)