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September 26, 2007

The user experience of the new iPod Touch: some tests and feedbacks

After few weeks from the official launch of the new iPod Touch I would like to share with all of you some impressions about the user experience of the product. I was able to test the product into the London Apple Store in Regent Street and I did two tests. The tests have been video recorder using my smart NokiaN70 ( that is, actually, my best mobile device I had ever used and bought in terms of price/perfomances ratio ).

The first test was about observing another user interacting on her own with the product. The user seemed to have a good feeling in using the product, mainly related to the main navigation pathes ( mainly moving back from subsections to the main menu ) and the photo browsing. It seemed that the product answered properly in terms of pure quick information display.

The second test I did was conducted by myself, in order to have a non-neutral approach and having in mind some task specific issues. The task have been: blog reading ( and wi-fi navigation ), youtube browsing, contacts editing, photo browsing.

Task1: Using a Blog
The experience to read and browse on a blog seemed to me very difficult only for one single specific step: inserting the website URL using the virtual keyboard. My fingers seemed to be bigger than the area allocated for each single key...

Having virtual keyboards on small display suffered of specific issues related to the Fitts Law.

Using the classical T9 on Opera Mini using my Nokia N70 was really quicker than using the full qwerty virtual keyboard on the iPod Touch.

After I reaching the webpage, reading the blog was really....cool!

Zooming and panning text, rotating the whole screen display and having such text experience on all mobile devices I tested ( including the Nokia N800 ).

Task2: Using youtube
This task has been the bad one...the working and just enabled wi-fi connection seemed to need some further configuration...

Unfortunally the error message was not so clear to explain why the error happened and how to solve it.

Task3: Browsing pictures
The very interesting experience of browsing pictures just sliding the and using the multitouch interface to zoom in-out on any picture was not so bad.

The interface offered an interesting feedback to tell me "Pay attention! no more zoom level available!: it simply stop zooming into the picture but with an elastic effect.

The change of orientation for each picture was activable simply rotating the whole device.

In this task it seemed to act not properly very often...I had experienced several delays and also sometimes the picture refused to change orientation ( mainly from Portrait to Landscape ).

Task4: Editing contacts
As a final test, I would to edit/insert some contact in the address book and, as experienced in task1, the main issues was related to text input....

It was really, really feeling bad...I was frustrated by the thin sizes of each single Key of the virtual KeyBoard ( mainly the "i Key ).

Conclusions:
I think that the iPod Touch could be an interesting solution to have always with you the contents you like ( video, photos and music ) and also a very good solution to access onLine contents ( mainly texts and pictures ), having a really good quality text rendering and page browsing. Another very must-have feature is the picture browser that is simply amazing...sharing the picture with your friends on-the-go or simply having a look to maps on-the-go.

On the other hand, I dont suggest to use it as an edit/input devices, because the very bad feeling with virtual keyboard....mainly if u have just your fingers to touch the screen.

Further works:
From 3rd October Ill be in NY and I will repeat a new user-oriented test on the interface of the iPhone touch and I will concentrate on using the google maps application, comparing it the actual J2ME version I use on my small Nokia N70.

Resources
PDF guide of the iPod Touch features