Amazon’s new Kindle Fire tablet, according to the usability experts at the Nielsen Norman Group. In a report published Monday, Group founder Jakob Nielsen says the Fire suffers from all sorts of usability problems and offers a disappointingly poor user experience.

Nielsen takes issue with virtually every aspect of the device, from hardware to operating system, but his chief complaint seems to be its 7-inch size and Amazon’s failure to optimize the user experience for it.

“The most striking observation from testing the Fire is that everything is much too small on the screen, leading to frequent tap errors and accidental activation,” says Nielsen, who labels the issue the “fat finger problem” and notes that he’s seen it occur on pages with as few as two text fields and button.

Equally troublesome, the fat Web site problem — cramming a site intended for a desktop browser into the Fire’s significantly smaller screen with little or no optimization. “Using designs intended for a full screen on a 7-inch tablet is like squeezing a size-10 person into a size-7 suit,” says Nielsen. “Not going to look good.” Yet, that’s what the Fire attempts to do, even though it does wonderfully with mobile sites optimized for 3.5-inch screens.

Beyond these, Nielsen has plenty of other criticisms. The Fire is too heavy; its screen updates lag; its “Page” and “Text” views are lousy. But again, most of the gripes come back to the 7-inch form factor. In order for the Fire to succeed it needs content and services that are designed specifically for it. Repurposed content from other platforms just isn’t going to cut it.

“A 7-inch tablet is a sufficiently different form factor that it must be treated as a new platform,” Nielsen concludes. “Optimize for 7-inch or die.”

“The iPad measured at 6.2 percent lower reading speed than the printed book, whereas the Kindle measured at 10.7 percent slower than print.”

–Usability expert Jakob Nielsen says it’s faster to read a book on paper than it is on a Kindle or iPad

But despite Digg’s move, the controversial practice of framing seems to be making a comeback on the Web. Danny Sullivan, editor of the Web site Searchengineland.com wrote in an article about Digg’s toolbar changes, that Facebook, Ask.com and StumbleUpon have all begun framing links recently.

Web usability expert Jakob Nielsen argues that “frames break the fundamental user model of the web page.” “All of a sudden, you cannot bookmark the current page and return to it (the bookmark points to another version of the frameset), URLs stop working, and printouts become difficult. Even worse, the predictability of user actions goes out the door: who knows what information will appear where when you click on a link?”

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Why would Microsoft pay such a premium for Yahoo, given slowing growth in display advertising? The Nielsen Norman Group’s Jakob Nielsen has an idea or two. Here’s one of them: Web-mail-associated searches.

When they want to search, a lot of users go for the nearest ‘type-in place’ they can find. So if a search box is visible on the current page, that site will often get the query, and the ensuing bountiful revenues. Many users don’t even know how to get to the homepage of their favorite search engine.

“Thus, if Microsoft took over the email accounts currently served by Yahoo, it would get many of the searches done after people check their email (something that’s very sticky–users are reluctant to abandon their email addresses).

“The question, of course, is whether such accidental use of a search engine is as valuable as searches by more-determined users who go straight to their favorite search engine. Yahoo would know, since they serve both kinds of searches, but the numbers are surely kept as a state secret.”

Ironic, isn’t it, that amid all this chatter about a second boom, the exemplar of the first boom’s grotesque excesses has popped back up like the dead guy in “Weekend at Bernie’s”?
Admittedly, the site is an entirely different animal this time around. Founded by Ray Nolan, creator of Web Reservations International, the new Boo.com will be a social-networking and travel-booking site.

“Given the history of the old Boo, we wanted to get it out there that things work well,” Feargal Mooney, Boo’s chief operating officer, told ZDnet. “We didn’t want to have to pull (the site) down five minutes after launching it. The techie space will remember, but the general public will not remember that much … [Boo is the] anti-Boo.” For his sake, he better hope so.

^*The New York Times once tallied up Boo.com’s expenditures, which included $150,000 annual salaries for the founders, plus $100,000 apiece to rent apartments in London and another $100,000 to redecorate them; $654,100 on promotional giveaways like disposable cameras and snow globes; and $5,000 per day to a crew of fashion consultants and hairstylists hired to perfect the look of Miss Boo, the site’s computer-animated mascot, about which a usability expert once said, “She is prettier than Microsoft’s Bob but just as annoying.“