Dorm Room Tycoon has published an interview with Jakob Nielsen, covering mobile and Web usability. It’s worth listening to (or you can read the transcript).
A few highlights:
- Nielsen explains that there is not one but two classes of tablets, differentiated by screen size: regular and mini. Optimizing an interface for the tablet thus means optimizing it for two different screens:
The sort of the smaller tablets, the mini tablets, if you just take a regular tablet, a big sized tablet and squeezed that application down, or that website down, you’re not getting good usability. Conversely, if you take a phone design, and you just enlarge it a little bit, then it will work, but it’s not going be that great either. If you want to have great usability, you have to design for each of these different screen sizes.
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Nielsen suggests one by one centimeter hit zone as a minimum for touch interfaces.
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On carousels:
It’s hard to keep on this, but one of the plagues that’s really on the web right now is overuse of carousels and this notion that home page can’t have one main feature. It has to have ten of them, and you rotate through them at either a rapid pace that nobody can read them, or so slow a pace that nobody knows that they’re there because they always scroll past.
- On the reciprocity principle:
You install the app, and the first thing that happens when you start it up is it comes up and says, “This app wants to send you notifications,” and basically disrupts your entire day. Most people say, “No. Let me first get to know and like you.” Then, the reciprocity principle will kick in. […] You first have to do something good to the user, and then they will reciprocate.