Released April, Apple's iPad 2 is faster and skinnier than its predecessor. Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

One year after the iPad’s release, third-party apps have improved dramatically in usability, according to an interface scientist.

Jakob Nielsen, often hailed as “king of usability,” published results this week on a follow-up study examining iPad app interfaces. He found that iPad apps today are considerably “less wacky” and therefore easier to use than they were last year.

“We really came quite a long way in a year, and a year is a short amount of time,” Nielsen told Wired.com in a phone interview. “If we think back to when the web came out … there were five years when the web got worse before it started getting better.”

For software makers, interface design can be a tricky thing, because digital experiences are purely subjective. The ultimate question: What do customers want? For instance, where do they want this button, or what do they want to happen when selecting this menu? Software makers often must poll groups of testers before releasing their apps to the public to determine the most user-friendly design.

On the iPad, it can be especially challenging to nail usability, because multitouch gestures are invisible, and it’s up to the user to figure out which gestures do what. Compare that to the desktop PCs we’ve grown accustomed to, which deal with physical keyboard and mice, mouse pointers, windows and icons — usability is a bit more clear-cut in this environment.

The initial issue with the iPad, Nielsen pointed out last year, was that before the original iPad was released, Apple didn’t give developers iPads to test their apps on. Apple only allowed a select group of programmers access to iPads to test their apps in an isolated room with blacked-out windows at Apple headquarters, meaning they couldn’t do any user testing prior to the iPad’s release. Therefore, the earliest iPad apps were coded in the dark.

As a result, user interfaces in the initial batch of iPad apps were all over the map, with little consistency among the various apps. Apps would behave differently when we swiped or pinched, and some apps used complex interactions such as running three fingers diagonally across the screen, Nielsen said.

Today, iPad apps have become more simple and user-friendly, Nielsen said. He found that magazine apps, for example, would display a cover with the top stories, and tapping on a top story would bring you straight to the content, rather than make you turn to the table of contents and flip to the article manually. His study also found that more apps included Back buttons and broader use of search.

“For the average user, technology is a means to an end,” Nielsen said. “People want to jump in and get results. If I see a cover with three interesting [stories], I want to tap and read right away.”

To conduct his study, Nielsen recruited 16 iPad customers with two months of experience using their iPads. Nielsen’s team watched the test subjects as they launched and interacted with 26 different apps and six websites.

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