Nielsen Norman group has slammed gestural interfaces, in an article entitled A Step Backwards In Usability:

The usability crisis is upon us, once again. We suspect most of you thought it was over.

Given that two-year-olds and centenarians are using iPads, I did, yes.

Well you are wrong.

Oh.

In a recent column for Interactions (reference 2) Norman pointed out that the rush to develop gestural interfaces – “natural” they are sometimes called – well-tested and understood standards of interaction design were being overthrown, ignored, and violated.

Violated? Sounds serious. SOMEONE CALL THE USER INTERACTION POLICE.

 

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INT: Nielsen Norman group. Donald A. Norman and Jakob Nielsen get into their superhero outfits and zoom towards the scene.

Super Norman: OH MY GOD, it’s worse than we thought, Jackob. It’s horrific.

Super Nielsen: Yes, new technologies require new methods, but the refusal to follow well-tested, well-established principles leads to usability disaster. I will KILL THE VIOLATORS WITH MY LASER VISION.

Super Normal: You don’t have laser vision, Jakob.

Super Nielsen: Bugger. How about moaning about the iPad in my bi-monthly column for ACM CHI magazine, then?

Super Normal: Sounds great!

END CREDITS

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OK, *serious face*, these guys do have some good points regarding visbility, consistency, scalability and reliability—all standard tenets of strong usability. Gestures aren’t necessarily easily discoverable in iOS and other touch-based systems, but that’s also largely because many of them are new. Guidelines are, through popularity, slowly being formed. Nielsen Norman group also don’t seem to note that the intuitive nature of gestural interfaces (rather than the abstraction seen in other forms of computing) means that things are more easily learned and less likely forgotten. My dad can happily do stuff on my iPhone, despite not owning any iOS device, yet his Mac still regularly flummoxes him.

Anyway, back to the article:

The first crop of iPad apps revived memories of Web designs from 1993, when Mosaic first introduced the image map that made it possible for any part of any picture to become a UI element. As a result, graphic designers went wild: anything they could draw could be a UI, whether it made sense or not. It’s the same with iPad apps: anything you can show and touch can be a UI on this device. There are no standards and no expectations.

No standards? Really? I’m pretty sure Apple has extensive guidelines on user interaction. But there are apparently other reasons people are having trouble.

The misguided insistence by companies (e.g., Apple and Google) to ignore established conventions and establish ill-conceived new ones.

Yes. Let’s stop innovating.

The developer community’s apparent ignorance of the long history and many findings of HCI research which results in their feeling of empowerment to unleash untested and unproven creative efforts upon the unwitting public.

JUST STOP TRYING NEW THINGS, IGNORANT DEVELOPERS!

In comments to Nielsen’s article about our iPad usability studies, some critics claimed that it is reasonable to experiment with radically new interaction techniques when given a new platform. We agree. But the place for such experimentation is in the lab.

ALTHOUGH IF YOU’RE RICH DEVELOPERS, WE PERMIT YOU TO EXPERIMENT IN YOUR ‘LAB’!

Most progress is made through sustained, small incremental steps. Bold explorations should remain inside the company and university research laboratories and not be inflicted on any customers until those recruited to participate in user research have validated the approach.

Bold explorations like the top-selling iPad and iPhone, you mean, rather than the sustained, small incremental steps we’d previously seen in smartphones and tablets? OK, sounds great. I’ll see you back before the turn of the century and we can party like it’s 1999 until we die of RSI through using our mice until our arms explode. I look forward to it.

Hat tip: Chris Brennan.

Richard Hillgrove, in The Guardian, writing Twitter cannot be allowed to operate outside the law:

The central point here is whether Twitter and Facebook, as publishers of content, should be as accountable as traditional media. The problem is one of scale. Traditional media controls its content by employing finite numbers of staff, freelance journalists and news agencies. In contrast, Facebook have an army of “citizen journalists” numbering 500 million and Twitter 175 million and don’t employ any of them.

Clearly, they are going to have to introduce a delay mechanism so that content can be checked before it goes up. There will have to be a completely different structure, which will be difficult when the whole thing about Twitter is its spontaneity.

Oh dear.

To be fair, Hillgrove’s Guardian profile describes him as “a business and political public relations consultant”, but this is precisely why anyone creating laws and regulations or even talking about doing so needs to bloody well research, rather than shouting their mouth off. Hillgrove’s comment might have a certain right-on set of Brits and others going “Yes! Twitter must do this”, but Hillgrove clearly has no comprehension whatsoever of the sheer amount of content social networks and other major websites generate. It’s not remotely feasible for any of it to be checked—YouTube gets more then two days’ worth of video uploaded every minute. How the hell can that be checked?

Hillgrove also bleats about accountability (arguing the likes of Twitter should be treated like traditional media) and reeling in social networks unless we “decide to become an anarchistic society”. Much better, clearly, that we become a society that stops the equalising nature of the web and curtails free speech, because otherwise rich people get caught short. And, yes, I realise Twitter and Facebook have an appalling herd mentality at times, but often the herd uses its powers for good—something that is diminishingly so for traditional media.

Hat-tip: Fraser Speirs.

Poor Adele. I’m CRYING MY EYES OUT right now, having read The Guardian’s piece on the poor singer. Adele, the multi-million selling artist, has had to… sorry, I’m finding it hard to bring myself to type this… she’s had to pay tax. Yes, I know. Actual tax.

I’m mortified to have to pay 50%! [While] I use the NHS, I can’t use public transport any more. Trains are always late, most state schools are shit, and I’ve gotta give you, like, four million quid – are you having a laugh? When I got my tax bill in from [the album] 19, I was ready to go and buy a gun and randomly open fire.

I’ve been thinking about what we can all do to help. It must be really hard as a 23-year-old, plucked from obscurity and having number-one albums all over the world, to have to pay tax. Maybe we can all have a whip-round and help her.

Let’s of course ignore the fact no-one in the UK pays 50%, because the 50% band only affects income over ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY FUCKING THOUSAND POUNDS. (You pay less on earnings under that amount.) Also, let’s ignore her tax bill being less than her net income for working on one album, meaning she’s made more from that than many indie bands will make during their ENTIRE FUCKING CAREERS.

Good grief, Adele, way to endear yourself to your audience. I bet most people and certainly most musicians would be jumping for joy if they could get a four-million quid tax bill for a year or so’s work, because it’d mean they’d received income to keep of more than four million pounds, you spoiled brat.

Nicely spotted by Charles Arthur at The Guardian. Dell’s new XPS-15 marketing has caught the eye of a lot of websites, which have parroted Dell’s claim, without bothering to investigate it. That claim:

Finally, the power you crave in the thinnest 15″ PC on the planet*.

Charles Arthur:

Wow, the thinnest? But wait, what’s the asterisk?

Small print time: “Based on Dell internal analysis as at February 2011. Based on a thickness comparison (front and rear measurements) of other 15″ laptop PCs manufactured by HP, Acer, Toshiba, Asus, Lenovo, Samsung, Sony, MSI. No comparison made with Apple or other manufacturers not listed.”

Classy stuff, Dell. Still, as we all know, Michael Dell is the best CEO on the planet*

 

 

* Based on ignoring quite a few other CEOs who, quite clearly, are better than Dell, but, hey, is that really important anyway? Can’t we all just get along, even if companies are lying through their teeth in making misleading advertising claims that are objective and can therefore be checked against actual facts, rather than sensibly making more subjective statements? Actually, no, because Dell is a pillock.

A great piece from Ars Technica’s Chris Foresman on openness advocates Google now blocking rooted Android devices from its new movie-rental service. You know, those devices people rooted to remove all the crap carriers bundle, to ‘add value’, which is a benefit of Android being ‘open’?

But it serves as yet another example that Android’s openness only extends as far as it benefits Google.

I’m wondering when people will get the hint about this. Everyone whinges about Apple’s walled garden, but it’s pretty clear Google just has a different kind of wall, and one it’s sneakily putting up a brick at a time, hoping no-one’s watching. There is one big difference with Apple, though, as Harry Marks says:

Where’s the outrage? Where are the riots? Where’s the media sensationalisation?

Where indeed? I guess, for some reason that isn’t entirely clear to me, while Apple blocking jailbroken iOS devices from iBooks is evil, Google blocking rooted Android devices from movie rentals is a-OK.