Usability Benchmark Study of Commercially Available Smart Phones:
This paper talks about the most important research question of the present era- when designing the mobile phones, should features be given more importance / Usability? More features attract customers but what makes them stick to the product is the ease of use. The paper considers the mobile OS platform as the independent variable and Effectiveness, Efficiency and satisfaction as the dependent variables and presents statistics of these parameters in today's smart phones.
Gestural Interfaces:
The author highly criticizes the current smart phones. He says "Well tested and understood standards of interaction design are overthrown" . He considers few principles of HCI like visibility, feedback, consistency , non destructive operations, discoverability, scalability and reliability and provides a detailed description on how the smart phones fail to meet these basic principles. The author demands on a need to return to basics and develop usability guidelines for these systems that are based upon solid principles of interaction design and not on the whims of the company-interface guidelines or arbitrary ideas of developers.
Usability of iPad Apps:
The paper provides a detailed description on the design of IPad apps and how they should be designed when compared to the traditional websites. Various design techniques have been explored with pictorial representations on the apps that meet the standards and apps that fail to meet the standards. Things that make the app fail has also been illustrated.