A year after our first usability study of iPad apps, it’s nice to see that iPad user interfaces have become decidedly less wacky. It’s even better to see good uptake of several of our recommendations from last year, including apps with:

back buttons,
broader use of search,
homepages, and
direct access to articles by touching headlines on the front page.

Even so, this year’s testing still found many cases in which users accidentally touched something and couldn’t find their way back to their start point, as well as magazine apps that required multiple steps to access the table of contents. —iPad Usability: Year One Jakob Nielsens Alertbox.