Andrew Chen

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Usability presentation for iPhone apps and store

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Usability notes from iPhone apps
I found these interesting notes on how people use the iPhone, mostly usability-oriented, focused on a couple key applications and areas. It’s useful info for anyone who is building on the iPhone platform, which has some very unique interactions that even expert users have a tough time mastering.

The presentation covers the following apps:

  • browsing
  • time/calendar/alarm
  • maps
  • youtube
  • downloaded apps: air hockey, koi pond, labyrinth
  • iphone store (including pricing, reviews, etc.)

Then there’s a nice wrap-up of best practices for iPhone app usability, which is always nice.

Here’s the full presentation – you’ll have to click through the link if you are reading this in an RSS reader:

How people really use the iPhone

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: development interaction)

Written by Andrew Chen

November 10th, 2008 at 8:00 am

Posted in Uncategorized

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  • Andrew, thanks for posting our research - great to see it getting around. "Self-reporting" is definitely an issue that researchers have to be careful with; we use a technique where we have participants perform a series of activities, and then extract the findings from what they do rather than what they say, which we find works quite well. What I found interesting was that reactions to ratings and reviews mirrored what we saw a while back when we did a study for Yahoo! looking at the impact of social media and search on major purchases (that presentation is at http://createwithcontext.com/media/yahoo-summit...).
  • Very interesting research. I'm especially intrigued about the results of the App Store behaviors. Most of what I saw confirmed my own suspicions, but it's reassuring to see people taking reviews "with a grain of salt". A lot of developers (myself included) have felt that the reviews on an app can make or break it with new users, but if people really are skeptical, then there may be some hope.
  • re: reviews, it may be that this is an error with self-reporting, actually - a good way to drill into this further would be to do a cardsort asking them to rank different attributes in importance (reviews, rating, icon, description, WOM, etc) and see how they would rank them. If you ask them explicitly if they would trust reviews, I think there's a distinctly American attitude of "I don't care what people think!" even if they might.

    As a comparison, consider what it'd be like to ask everyone if they picked fashions based on what other people would think - I'm sure you'd get an above average number of people stating that they dress for themselves, not others, when it's probably not true ;-)
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