Earlier this month, Yankee Group analyst Carl Howe predicted that the iPad would become the fastest consumer product in history to hit the $1 billion mark. While that's a tough call to make definitively, it is undeniable that the iPad has surpassed mere hype and made at least a commercial splash. Some analysts believe it is changing the nature of personal computing, too. What do you think?

"The iPad is a new kind of PC. It ushers in a new era of Curated Computing -- a mode of computing in which choice is constrained to deliver more relevant, less complex experiences. Curated Computing is necessary to empower alternative form factors, such as touchscreen tablets, wearable and ambient devices, game consoles, and connected TVs. The iPad's Curated Computing experience makes the tablet form factor viable for the first time since it was introduced commercially more than two decades ago."

- Forrester's Sarah Rotman Epps, Apple's iPad is a New Kind of PC. (Brings to mind Chris Messina's Death of the URL.)

"In my initial review, I focused on capabilities. And tablets are stuck between the power and utility of the notebook and the size and features of a smartphone. But they also create a middle place in terms of usability. And that is what I missed in my first day with the iPad. It feels less like a computer than any computing device I've owned. It's easy on me in a way that the other devices are not. So I'm now convinced that tablets will have an important place in our homes and our lives."

- Tech investor Fred Wilson, I've Changed My Mind About the iPad. Wilson has also said that he prefers reading content in mobile Safari over content-centric apps. Take that, curated web.

Wilson's appreciation of the iPad's usability contradicts with usability expert Jakob Nielsen's assessment :

"iPad apps are inconsistent and have low feature discoverability, with frequent user errors due to accidental gestures. An overly strong print metaphor and weird interaction styles cause further usability problems."

Personally, I love mine. I wish there were more apps, but I really enjoy using Facebook, YouTube, Twitterific and a number of other apps on it. It feels casual, efficient, enjoyable. It helps me get my laundry folded and my dishes done. I like it, a lot.

My wife says it doesn't feel crazy, novel and magical anymore - now it feels indispensable and integrated into our lives. "It's like finding a lover," she says. "At first everything they do is exciting, but over time a good lover becomes more of a real person. Some of the initial fascination is gone, but it becomes a super important part of your life. And like a good lover, in time it becomes difficult to imagine going to bed without it each night." I'm not entirely sure how I feel about that, but I appreciate her letting me quote her saying it in this post. So far at least, I do not feel jealous of the iPad.

What's your take on the iPad?

Dave Stanton of the Poynter Institute leads an SxSW session: "My Three-Year Old is my Usability Expert."

Recently, PayPal's Developer Challenge crowdsourced ideas for better integrating payment into developers' own applications. And last year, Netflix awarded $1 million to the team that improved its recommendation algorithm by more than 10%. (Over 50,000 contestants entered the challenge.)

With so much impetus behind technological advancements, some innovative minds -- particularly in the areas of design and usability -- are looking back to a kind of vintage simplicity in distilling the problem and solution principles underlying their creations.

Last month at SXSW, Dave Stanton, a cognitive researcher and Technology Fellow at The Poynter Institute, ran a session entitled "My Three-Year Old is my Usability Expert."

In certain contexts, children's natural limitations turn to strengths. "Children are terrific UI testers because they haven't developed the language necessary to parse text instructions; they have to rely on visual cues," explains Stanton. "Children can help us balance intuitive interfaces with the domain-specific attributes designers use to convey personality."

My 3-year-old daughter is my usability expert

Young children adopt a fundamentally different approach to technology. We can see this at work in simple ways - in the toddler who, accustomed to her mother's iPhone, instinctively approaches a laptop by swiping a finger across it. "We are moving toward more naturalistic interfaces utilizing feel, sound and sight for both user input and device feedback," describes Stanton. "I'm excited to see the elegant modes of human-computer interaction we can uncover by studying how children leverage these mechanisms in problem-solving scenarios."

In conjunction with ReadWriteWeb, Latitude Research is taking children's unique approach to technology one step further. "This project is a step toward understanding how children can help us generate abstract solutions with potential real-world applications," Stanton says.

As part of an open innovation study (whose lead analyst is Jessica Reinis), we're asking kids, age 12 and under, to create ideas for future Web technologies (or, more likely, to demonstrate the underlying, creative-thinking principles which beget these types of innovations) by drawing the answer to a simple question: What would be really fun or interesting to do on your computer or the Internet that you can't do right now?

"The difference between today's children and yesterday's was what technologies were available to them as they tried to make sense of the world around them," said ethnographer and social media researcher danah boyd, when we asked her how pervasive digital culture might be affecting younger generations. "But youth accept whatever contemporary technology is available and try to see if it makes sense in their lives. Adults are the ones who have to shift their understanding of the world based on technology." Naturally, we're interested to see how Web solutions can be informed by more technologically "intuitive" sensibilities when child becomes creator.

Screenshot of the Latitude/RWW study: Kids' Future Requests for Computers and the Internet.

To participate in the study, click here. Latitude's open innovation privacy policy is available here.

Photo by cell911.

Google today introduced a new feature that will let mainstream users get search results to hold still and remain where they expect them to be. It's called Stars and it's essentially pinning a link permanently to the top of a search results page for a certain query.

When one of our blog posts showed up high in a Google search last month for "Facebook login" we saw hundreds of thousands of confused people stream into our site and post typo-ridden comments like "I WANT MY FAFEBOOK!" Many of them couldn't tell that they were visiting a blog post about Facebook, and with Facebook Connect login, and not Facebook.com itself. Even though we said as much in big bold letters after the first few thousand of them.

Thousands more people visited the site to gawk at those users and their comments. A common response was for web designers to say "we must not be serving mainstream users very well if they are confused in a situation like this."

Enter features like Google Stars. It's a great idea. No dumbing-down the internet for those lucky relative few of us who do know how to use it, just some additional options for those who are still beginning to learn. Expect to see more developments like this as regular web use becomes a more common experience for non technical people. This may be an example of a best-case solution.

Update: Several people in comments have said they don't think Stars are going to work for mainstream users, either. What do you think?

Editor's note: This story is part of a series we call Redux, where we'll re-publish some of our best posts of 2009. As we look back at the year - and ahead to what next year holds - we think these are the stories that deserve a second glance. It's not just a best-of list, it's also a collection of posts that examine the fundamental issues that continue to shape the Web. We hope you enjoy reading them again and we look forward to bringing you more Web products and trends analysis in 2010. Happy holidays from Team ReadWriteWeb!

First Tests Are Coming Soon

For now, Mozilla will start the program with a survey that aims to get a better understanding of who is joining the Test Pilot community. The first actual tests should arrive soon after this first survey is complete.

Mozilla stresses that it will take its users' privacy seriously. Participants have to opt-in and data will be stored in anonymous form. Only aggregate test data will be made available to the public.

Overall, this looks like a great project. Usability studies tend to be slow and costly, yet with Test Pilot, Mozilla will be able to quickly enlist feedback about new design ideas from its large community of users.

Senior Wired Magazine editor Robert Capps penned an article titled "The Good Enough Revolution" for Wired's September 2009 edition. The print edition included the daring (and perhaps intentionally provocative) subtitle "Why lo-fi tech will rule the world."

This rings of an absolutism, and such rings set off our antennae.

The best example, the Flip video, "nail(s) all three of those... traits." But not every product does. Take the computer market. Sure, netbooks sell like hotcakes while most of the rest of the market takes a beating. But there's a fly in the ointment: Apple.

Apple hasn't lowered its prices or jumped on the netbook bandwagon... yet (we'll keep our ears open for any announcements on that). Yet the company's fortunes continue to soar in the face of deplorable market conditions, which Capps asserts should make lo-fi tech spread faster.

New York Times columnist David Pogue gave a convincing talk on this subject, which he called "Simplicity Sells," and between rousing musical numbers he returned several times to the things Apple does right.

Pogue also mentioned a discussion he had with a "tap counter" while visiting a Palm facility in the 1990s. According to Pogue, this person counted taps for each feature that Palm put into its PDA. If a process took more than three taps, it had to be redesigned.

On this point, Pogue and Capps largely agree. Pogue, however, wisely sidesteps the land mines of "lo-fi," "price," and any other down-market connotation.

That's because "good enough" in technology means "accessible" and "easy to use." "Cheaper" is a nice bonus, but millions of people continue to prove that they will pay a higher initial cost to make sure that what they get is good enough. Capps stumbled only in neglecting this price-elasticity counter-argument.

Read his excellent article anyway (and check out David Pogue at TED) and get inspired. In any case, whatever you offer:

• Make it easy to use,
• Make it accessible,
• And above all, make sure it satisfies the needs of your clientele.

Do all of this, and higher prices might not bother potential customers as much as you fear.

Does this logic apply to your business? Let us know. We'd love to hear your opinion.

For now, Mozilla will start the program with a survey that aims to get a better understanding of who is joining the Test Pilot community. The first actual tests should arrive soon after this first survey is complete.

Mozilla stresses that it will take its users' privacy seriously. Participants have to opt-in and data will be stored in anonymous form. Only aggregate test data will be made available to the public.

Overall, this looks like a great project. Usability studies tend to be slow and costly, yet with Test Pilot, Mozilla will be able to quickly enlist feedback about new design ideas from its large community of users.

It's worth noting that WordPress isn't just any chunk of software: it played a formative role in the early days by giving millions of people a voice online. It's still one of the best examples of an open source ecosystem which has been made infinitely more rich for users by involvement of outside developers than the company could have created by itself. And it's a system used by some of the biggest publishing firms in the world at a time when the publishing industry is undergoing one of its biggest periods of change ever. CNN, Time, the New York Times and millions upon millions of bloggers are all using WordPress. Helping test the next version of this software is a pretty big deal.

WordPress interface and experience designer, Jane Wells, wrote about opening the testing process this morning and said that she's spent years responding to people who reference a nine year old article by usability guru Jakob Nielsen. Nielsen argued that usability tests only needed 5 participants in order to be effective:

"As you add more and more users, you learn less and less because you will keep seeing the same things again and again. There is no real need to keep observing the same thing multiple times, and you will be very motivated to go back to the drawing board and redesign the site to eliminate the usability problems.

After the fifth user, you are wasting your time by observing the same findings repeatedly but not learning much new."

Wells writes in response that, "While I've found that to be generally true, when your user base is as diverse in experience level, usage, platform configuration, language (right to left languages have a pretty different experience) and demography as the WordPress community is, 5 users really isn't enough to get a clear picture."

If you'd like to participate in this usability testing, professional usability test moderators are encouraged to contact Wells and eager guinea pigs are told to watch this space.

Plaxo and Google have collaborated on an OpenID method that may represent the solution to OpenID's biggest problems: it's too unknown, it's too complicated and it's too arduous. Today at the User Experience Summit, Plaxo announced that early tests of its new OpenID login system had a 92% success rate - unheard of in the industry. OpenID's usability problems appear closer than ever to being solved for good.

Plaxo, primarily known for the noxious flood of spam emails it delivered in its early days, is now an online user activity data stream aggregator owned by telecom giant Comcast. The Plaxo team has been at the forefront of the new Open Web paradigm best known for the OpenID protocol.

The Flow

The method Plaxo has been testing is called an OpenID/OAuth combo, in collaboration with Google. What does that mean, in regular terms? It means that Plaxo told users they could log in with their Gmail accounts as OpenID by clicking a link to open a Gmail window, then Google asked for permission to hand over user contact data using the OAuth standard protocol. Once login was confirmed, whether contact data access was granted to Plaxo or not, the Gmail window closed and users were returned to Plaxo all logged in. No new accounts, no disclosure of Gmail passwords to Plaxo, no risky account scraping and no need to import or find friends on the new service before immediate personalization could be offered.

This is a very different flow than most OpenID "relying parties" have followed before - but it won't be for long.

The Success Rate

Plaxo reported today that it has seen a staggering 92% of users who clicked on the "log-in with Gmail" button come back to Plaxo with permission to authenticate their identities via Gmail granted. Of those who returned, another 92% also granted permission for Plaxo to access their contacts list. Only 8% of the people who clicked to log in with a standards based 3rd party authentication ended up deciding to bail instead. That's the kind of ease-of-use that people presumed only Facebook Connect could provide.

When Plaxo engineers moved to turn off the short-term experiment, the business team said no way.

We expect to see this basic flow get iterated on even further. We hope it will ensure that every OpenID provider has some exposure and not just the big email providers, and we expect the pop-up action to be made increasingly unobtrusive.

This could be the day when OpenID became a far more realistic prospect than it has seemed before.

As Google also points out, scanning the search results page and deciding where to look at and what to click on seems to be an almost completely subconscious process.

Overall, users on Google's search page follow the familar F-shaped pattern that was also apparent in earlier eye-tracking studies .

What About Google's Ads?

Google's researchers don't mention advertising in this post at all. Neither the video, nor most of the images in the post include any advertising. Given how important these ads are for Google, we can only asume that Google regularly uses these studies to test how its users perceive the advertising on the search results pages.

Judging from the only images that show ads, most users only look at them after they have scanned through at least the first three or four search results.

Chances are that Google didn't want to give away too much of its secret sauce, though it would have been nice to see a bit more information about how users perceive and react to these ads.

How It Works

The "hybrid approach" - currently available in a limited beta - that Google and Plaxo have employed uses OpenID to sign in, then invokes OAuth for delegated authorization, and finally calls on the Google Contacts API to access information about contacts. And it does all of this transparently to the end user.

The first step in the Plaxo-Google scenario involves a new user being invited to Plaxo by a friend via Gmail. The invite understands the user is logged into the Google system and prompts the recipient with a "Sign up with my Google Account" button.

After clicking the button, the new user is directed to a Google Accounts page and asked to confirm their identity. The user is also given the option of allowing Plaxo to remember him or her in the future.

Accepting the sign-in request allows Plaxo to have access to the user's Google account credentials and the contacts associated with that account. The end result? The user now has a Plaxo account without all the rigamarole generally associated with a new account setup - and without a new username and password to track.

Why This Matters

While the concept of site-specific logins made sense in the early days of the Web, the idea of users being forced to develop a new identity, username, password, and profile on every site they visit - including adding all the same people as connections, over and over again - seems almost laughable today. It's definitely not scalable. Especially as password requirements become more and more stringent.

With the launch of Facebook Connect, the idea of a digital identity that could follow users from site to site moved from bleeding-edge tech people to a much larger contingent of the general populous. And the ease-of-use demonstrated by Facebook Connect put some friendly pressure on the OpenID contingent to improve the way they were managing the login process.

Plaxo's and Google's demonstration is something that could improve usability for all OpenID logins, reducing the series of handoffs that tend to frustrate and confuse users. But as Eric Eldon of VentureBeat notes, there is still more to be done:

"Multi-site sign on, like what the companies are announcing today, will be more compelling when it can bring integration down to one or zero clicks, but this is certainly a step in the right direction."

Who Wins? Everyone

This isn't a "winner takes all" pursuit or an "either/or" situation. We are participating in a Web environment where both Facebook Connect and OpenID can co-exist, because there are different applications that make both options viable and useful.

Personally, I'm not likely to use my Facebook account to access my bank and credit card accounts. But I am likely to use my Facebook credentials for social sites that would be enhanced by my existing Facebook connections. Similarly, my OpenID isn't always the right answer.

Facebook has momentum and a fervent user base. OpenID has a who's who of tech companies getting behind the concept as the preferred way to manage digital identities. Neither of these identity options are going away anytime soon.

What's best about the current situation is the rivalry between the two camps: one proprietary and easy-to-use, one open and more complex. It will be interesting to watch the two solutions push one another to become more and more simple for the end user. Because in that case, we all win.