“Amazon.com’s new Kindle Fire offers a disappointingly poor user experience,” Jakob Nielsen reports. “Using the web with the Silk browser is clunky and error-prone. Reading downloaded magazines is not much better.”
“The most striking observation from testing the Fire is that everything is much too small on the screen, leading to frequent tap errors and accidental activation,” Nielsen reports. “You haven’t seen the fat-finger problem in its full glory until you’ve watched users struggle to touch things on the Fire. One poor guy spent several minutes trying to log in to Facebook, but was repeatedly foiled by accidentally touching the wrong field or button — this on a page with only 2 text fields and 1 button. Our iPad testing showed that full sites work quite well on 10-inch tablets.”
MacDailyNews Take: One naturally thinks that a 7-inch screen would offer 70% of the benefits of a 10-inch screen. Unfortunately, this is far from the truth. The screen measurements are diagonal, so that a 7-inch screen is only 45% as large as iPad’s 10-inch screen. You heard me right: Just 45% as large.
If you take an iPad an hold it upright in portrait view and draw an imaginary horizontal line halfway down the screen, the screens on these 7-inch tablets are a bit smaller than the bottom half of the ipad’s display. This size isn’t sufficient to create great tablet apps in our opinion. While one could increase the resolution of the display to make up for some of the difference, it is meaningless unless your tablet also includes sandpaper, so that the user can sand down their fingers to around one quarter of their present size.
Apple has done extensive user testing on tough interfaces over many years and we really understand this stuff. There are clear limits of how close you can physically place elements on a touchscreen before users cannot reliably tap, flick, or pinch them. This is one of the key reasons we think the 10-inch screen size is the minimum size required to create great tablet apps… The 7-inch tablets are tweeners. Too big to compete with a smartphone and too small to compete with an iPad.
These are among the reasons we think the current crop of 7-inch tablets are going to be DOA. Dead On Arrival. Their manufacturers will learn the painful lesson that their tablets are too small and increase the size next year, thereby abandoning both customers and developers who jumped on the 7-inch bandwagon with an orphaned product.
Sounds like lots of fun ahead. – Steve Jobs, October 18, 2010
Nielsen continues, “The Fire is a heavy object. It’s unpleasant to hold for extended periods of time. Unless you have forearm muscles like Popeye, you can’t comfortably sit and read an engaging novel all evening… Screen updates are too slow, so scrolling can feel erratic and there’s a huge lag in response after pressing command-buttons. This breaks the illusion of direct manipulation. It’s odd that this happens; the Fire supposedly has a fast CPU and doesn’t push as many pixels as the iPad does. Must be sloppy programming.”
Much more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: It speaks volumes about the so-called “tablet market” that The Great Hope of iPad Wannabes is a slab o’ crap from an online retailer.
MacDailyNews Note: Jakob Nielsen has been called:
• “the king of usability” (Internet Magazine)
• “the guru of Web page usability” (The New York Times)
• “the smartest person on the Web” (ZDNet AnchorDesk)
• “the world’s leading expert on Web usability” (U.S. News & World Report)
• “the world’s leading expert on user-friendly design” (Stuttgarter Zeitung, Germany)
• “one of the world’s foremost experts in Web usability” (Business Week)
• “the Web’s usability czar” (WebReference.com)
• “the reigning guru of Web usability” (FORTUNE)
• “eminent Web usability guru” (CNN)
• “the usability Pope” (Wirtschaftswoche Magazine, Germany)/blockquote>Related articles:
Instapaper creator reviews Amazon’s tiny screen Kindle Fire: Bad game player, bad app platform, bad web browser, bad video player and bad Kindle – November 18, 2011
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The Verge reviews Amazon’s tiny-screen Kindle Fire: Uninspired, confusing, incredibly unoriginal – November 14, 2011
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The Guardian reviews Apple iPad 2: Ahead of the pack – March 25, 2011
The Telegraph reviews Apple iPad 2: Does everything better; now’s the perfect time to join the iPad club – March 25, 2011
Computerworld reviews Apple’s iPad 2: ‘The Holy Grail of computing’ – March 16, 2011
Ars Technica reviews Apple iPad 2: Big performance gains in a slimmer package
Associated Press reviews Apple iPad 2: Apple pulls further ahead – March 10, 2011
PC Mag reviews Apple iPad 2: The tablet to get; Editors’ Choice – March 10, 2011
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Baig reviews Apple iPad 2: Second to none – March 10, 2011
