For the last year, the publishing industry’s complacency about digital media has been rocked by the furor over the iPad (as well as other tablets arriving on the scene). Now our research – picture-in-picture usability testing of native versus “replica” iPad magazine apps – is shedding some light on logical next steps. Publishers and iPad: From underestimation to magical... [Read more]
I need to read. Always have. I can down books a lot faster than most, and I am bereft without something meaningful to read, especially on my frequent business trips. Anyone who knows me knows I love Vanity Fair as much as I love cyberpunk. They also know I spend a lot of time evaluating user experience (UX) for magazine apps, and all sorts of other digital products. So what does it mean when someone... [Read more]
Last week I had the privilege of participating in an event called UX for Good/UXXU 2011, organized by individuals (Insight Labs’ Jeff Leitner and Manifest Digital’s Jason Ulaszek) who saw an opportunity for five nonprofit organizations to benefit from the design discipline of user experience. Like any first-time project involving volunteers, it had its ups and downs. It also brimmed over... [Read more]
We continue to conduct usability evaluations on mostly disappointing magazine iPad apps. The usability problems for most magazine apps are sadly predictable, and much too common. Users, whether experienced iPad owners or first-time experimenters, run into trouble when trying to find tables of contents; when trying to reach a specific article within a magazine app; when distinguishing advertising from... [Read more]
Here at Interface Guru, we’ve been surveying project teams involved in the development of magazine-based apps for the iPad. It’s a topic of burning interest to many of our media clients. Our goal: to identify the most engaging, useful, usable media apps. And to find out how they got that way. We’re sorry to say that as of this writing, at the end of 2010, great brand experiences on... [Read more]
The beginning numbers for Black Friday and Cyber Monday – fuel for America’s economic engine – are rolling in. And they’re looking marginally better than last year’s. But they could be even better. Why? Because e-commerce sites are rife with usability problems – the kind that make users go elsewhere, or order less than they might have. We’re sorry to say that... [Read more]
Recently, I led a workshop in New York at MPA (formerly Magazine Publishers of America) for media professionals on evaluating usability for iPad apps. I was pleased to see some of the biggest names in the business in my workshop, where our goal was to learn how to evaluate usability and present the results in real-time. The tasks selected for evaluation included finding the table of contents in a magazine... [Read more]
We like Southwest Airlines’ witty EarlyBird Check-In™ campaign, which riffs on the airline’s early check-in option with a simple, compelling image of the poster animal for BP’s Gulf oil spill disaster – the pelican. Using a clean, easy-to-parse page layout, Southwest clearly explains: the oil spill’s impact on animals, its status as the official airline of the National... [Read more]
As we prepared for another road trip and the attendant joy of air travel in America in 2010, I was musing about the common sight of a human being helping passengers use the so-called “self-service” kiosk. It was in that frame of mind that I went to Facebook; I had to laugh when I saw this screen with the instruction: DO NOT CLICK THE “Go to Application” BUTTON ON LEFT! Human... [Read more]
I loved my Tweaker Speakers until one inexplicably died. So I go to Grandmax for tech support. After clicking the support link, here’s the error message: “We’re sorry, we’re temporarily undergoing maintenance! [Saeven|CRM cannot operate with register_globals set to 'On'. Set this to 'Off' using php.ini or a .htaccess directive, and restart your webserver thereafter.] ... [Read more]
