Usability researchers from the Nielsen Norman group have pointed out that well-tested and understood standards of interaction design are being “overthrown, ignored, and violated” in the rush to develop natural gestural interfaces that can lead to “usability disaster.”
“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,” said Norman Nielsen. “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.”
“One of the worst designs last year was USA Today‘s section navigation, which required users to touch the newspaper logo despite the complete lack of any perceived affordance that the logo would have this effect….
“I thought I’d driven a stake through splash screens many years ago and eradicated them from the Web, but apparently splash screens are super-vampires that can haunt users from beyond the grave.”
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