I used to read a lot of Jakob Nielsen's writing, on his website and books. I don't read his work so much now because I find what he says tends to be too conservative. He tends to be too strict with guidelines. For years he insisted that all unvisited hyperlinks should be blue and all visited ones should be purple.<p>One of the tricks with usability I've found is knowing which rules to stick to, which ones to bend and which ones to break.
First, I dispute saying that just because it's touch based, the iPad doesn't have a Graphical User Interface.<p>Second, another kind of device which got a no-holds-barred canvas to create beautiful and stylized interaction-based content was the DVD. The DVD menus for a LOT of titles are seriously crappy.<p>Even though Nielsen might err on the side of caution, he definitely has a point. People without guidelines have been producing pretty-but-non-functional GUIs before. Let's not keep the traditions alive.
I've always thought the flaw in Jakob Nielsen's thinking was that he was completely focused on standards and almost ignored design.<p>I much prefer Donald Norman's work.<p>As a contrast to 'design around standard so that people understand what to do', Norman says 'make things beautiful and playful so people want to use them'.
All standards are learned. What Jakob nielsen misses is that the touch interface is a new paradigme because it removes abstraction from the interaction. You can't judge it on old metrics that themselves in so many ways are wrong and clumbsy.<p>Jakob nielsen is wrong and have been for a long time. Usability isn't any longer a field to be taken serious in itself. Only when paired with actual design skills does it start to make sense. As a qualifier not as a discipline in itself.<p>I've said it before. In five years from now usability is nothing more than another tool in the designers box on the line of grid systems typography etc.