Posts Tagged ‘expert evaluation’
Driver: San Francisco Usability Review (Part 2)
Following up from my recent review of the top positive user experience elements in Driver: San Francisco, this week I’ll be looking at the top 5 usability and user experience issues that cause a negative player experience.
For each issue, I’ll also discuss potential fixes that could be implemented in order to create a more positive game playing experience.
Image by wiiloveit (Flickr)
User Centered Design vs. Genius Method – Which Approach Is Best for you?
This is a guest blog post by Devin Jordan of IdentityMine.com. Devin discusses some of the benefits of using an expert-evaluation based model, rather than a pure user-centred method. Read on to see his argument, and comment on what you think!
Pong – Playability Heuristics Review
The playability heuristics (guidelines) by Desurvire provide a quick and easy guide to the ‘playability’ of a game, as we’ve seen before. Today, we look at what they tell us about the user experience, and usability, through applying them to a classic game – Pong. For brevity, we’re only looking at the game play, and story (other heuristics are available from all good stores).
For those of you who are interested in game usability, and yet inexplicably are unaware of Pong, it’s the classic (stolen) 1970’s table tennis simulator. It makes a sound like ‘plink’, and looks like this:
but... more interactive
And on with the show.
Click to continue…
iPad Usability Study
Just a short update this week, sharing some thoughts on the recent Nielsen-Norman report on usability for the iPad. The recently published study was based research from a combination of both expert evaluation and user-testing, and aimed to discover how people interact with the iPad, and what issues typical users would encounter that prevent them from achieving their goals.
An iPad Nano
Jakob Nielsen admits that the study is not as thorough as a typical usability study. However has decided to share it anyway, due to the over-inflated impact that usability studies produced early in a devices’ lifecycle have been seen to have. As an aside, this is an interesting contrary viewpoint to the disadvantages of being first-to-market noted in ‘Inmates’, which argues that being first to market is irrelevant compared to being ‘best’.
The report has some interesting key findings, including that the apps seen on the iPad and the iPhone suffer from the re-emergence of a problem not seen since the early 90’s. Unlike web browsers and desktop software, which has established graphical conventions to highlight buttons and GUI elements, iPhone and iPad software has not implemented standard conventions, such as making a clickable button appear 3D. Hence there is no consistent manner of designating important aspects of the UI, and users just didn’t know what they could click on. Nielsen likens this to the first emergence of graphical interfaces of the early 90s, when anything and everything could be a button.
Its therefore clear that the main recommendation of the study is to standardize common elements, like navigation, among first and third party applications, such as “swipe to turn page”, or “press and hold to delete”. This also links with the studies’ findings that users were unsure what reaction their action would cause, as the apps have yet to find a consistent manner in which to work.
Not just a big iPhone
The study highlights how the iPad is not just a big iPhone, and different usability issues emerged on the larger device – most pertinent is that navigation elements on the bottom of the page, as seen in many iPhone applications, will not work on the iPad. The larger screen means that these elements are too far from the user’s field of vision to be noticed – and hence are not appropriate. What this means for people who make apps is that a custom iPad version is needed, not just relying on the ‘universal’ up scaling of iPhone apps.
The full report is linked below, and worth a look if you’re interested in the usability, the iPad, or designing an application!
Read the full report, here.
