iPhone Human Experience

We’re kicking off ux and design for an iPhone application at Roundarch, and I happened to come across a very insightful post by the infamous Jakob Nielsen on iPhone UI design.
Love him or hate him, he makes some solid points, some of which are obvious, some aren’t. Here are a few that I dug:

A very strong conclusion from our iPhone study is that people install many more apps than they actually use.

If you’re designing a “serious” business app that you think offers real benefits to your customers, you might feel above the fray of rude-bodily-noise apps. But you’re not … Your website is part of the Web ecosystem, and your site’s usability is dictated by the overall Web Human Experience, which is dominated by the sum of all other sites people visit.

Registration can certainly provide added business value and added usage convenience to your customers. But this is true only if people actually complete the registration. Sadly, if you push registration at users before they’re sufficiently convinced of your app’s value, many will simply back right out of the app and never try it again. You’ve then lost the one chance you’ll ever get at making a first impression (actually, any impression).