Strategic research company Create With Context has published a fascinating presentation online, titled How people really use the iPhone.

Even though you don’t get the team’s commentary, the slides on their own are very enlightening about the behavior of ordinary iPhone users as they navigate apps and try to use features.

The Create With Context team conducted formal usability studies of the kind where the user is asked to do certain tasks, but their every movement, swipe and tap is recorded, along with their spoken-aloud thoughts on what’s going on.

The research showed that some of the tasks that experienced iPhone users would consider trivially simple were much more complicated for newcomers to the interface. Simple things, like the color of an app’s icon when listed on the App Store, had a noticeable effect on user behavior (red puts some users off, it seems, by making them think that a “red” app icon is some kind of signal to warn them away - go figure).

Create With Context concludes by listing eight “rules of thumb” for iPhone app development. I won’t list them all here - go check out the slideshow for more background and the full list - but they include:

• Take advantage of learned behaviors (if you can make your app work in a similar way to one of the built-in apps, users won’t have to learn anything new)
• Put space between action widgets (anyone else noticed how easy it is to tap backspace instead of Go?)
• Provide visual feedback for taps (if the user taps on a button, make it move or do something else, to show that it has been tapped correctly)

Lots more in the slides. What do you make of the CWC results? How do they compare with your own experience?