What makes a good iPad app good?

In the interviews with some iPad users, consistent across the board, their expectations for a good iPad application are:

• Easy to use
• Easy to navigate
• Be able to find information fast
• Load fast
• No crashes

What are those? It’s a usability checklist. Believe it or not, the user expectations to a good iPad app are somewhat similar as to websites back in the 1990s. And interestingly enough, visuals are rarely mentioned in my study, neither in another study conducted by Bolt | Peters.

In 1998, Donald A. Norman published the groundbreaking book on usability and user-centered design The Design of Everyday Things (Norman, 1998); six years later another eye-catching book Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things (Norman, 2004) came out, unveiling a fact that attractive things do work better. Using web terminology in 2010, one might be interaction design; the other is visual design.

Although many iPad apps I downloaded look fancy and cool, not every one of them focuses on user essentials and basic needs, an important trait considered by a UX Lead at Google I interviewed for an article early in the year. There is still not a whole lot of iPad research out there but it’ll be interesting to see if the website trending from interaction design to a combination of visual design would apply to iPad app as well. For now, it’s kinda backward.

Design Process

When I created this diagram for a presentation that I did for my company’s online team, I felt this is the path that I should follow for any product development, whether I am an information architect, ux designer, or whatever title I will be wearing down the line: research, design, measure, and iterate.

Design doesn’t come out of vacuum. Keep in mind that 75% of the designers who relied on their personal opinion were wrong, from a piece of research conducted by Nielsen Norman Group.

It’s my belief that Design should be based on the solid user experience research including audience analysis, usability testing, focus group, online research, competitive analysis, and data analysis gathered from sales reporting, web analytics, user feedback, etc. etc.

And the missing step, for many corporates and design agencies might be, the measurement. It’s natural to just finish the design and throw it off the fence, but how does your baby perform? Is the bounce rate high? Is the time on site too short? Is the conversion rate too low? How do your users comment in your feedback form? What can you do to make it easier to use, more engaging, stickier and at the same time, convert more and drive more revenue that will make your stakeholders happy?

All in all, to research, to design, to measure, and to iterate.