Jakob Nielsen has done some usability testing on the iPad — the first person to publish results of any kind of formal user testing with the device, as far as I know. His results are interesting, but his conclusions are typically Nielsen-ish in their conservatism.

In short, he found that iPad apps are pretty confusing for users right now because it is a new platform and every app designer is trying different approaches in an attempt to take advantage of the device’s form factor, app model, and gesture support. Since everyone is being inventive and creating new ways of interacting with content, there is no consistency yet and therefore, users don’t know what to do.

Nielsen’s response: “Stop being so creative and experimental! Make it look and work just like the web! Make buttons look buttony and 3-D so users know where to tap!” One of my favorite quotes from his conclusions was:

“Abandon the hope of value-add through weirdness.”

But Jakob, don’t you get it? It’s the “weirdness” and the experimentation that lead to innovation. We need the weirdness. This is a necessary stage in the evolution of interaction design when a new platform comes along. The same thing happened in the early days of the web (and again in the early days of web 2.0). Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying I want users to be confused. But this stage will pass. Here’s what’s going to happen: We’ll have a period of turbulence where every app works differently and designers are trying every bizarre interaction model under the sun because…well, because now we CAN. Doing anything less would be like getting a pack of 64 Crayolas and only drawing in black and white. After a while, things will settle down, we’ll start to see what works best and those models will propagate and become standardized while others fall by the wayside. We will be unable to remember that we ever did anything other than “tap three times in a semicircular swoop” to get a contextual menu.

What comes out at the other end of this experimentation phase will be better and cooler and yes — more USABLE — than what we have on the web now. So telling designers to just settle down and stop being so creative is, in my humble opinion, just backwards thinking.

Here’s the full article for your perusal:

iPad Usability: First Findings From User Testing (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox).