Exploring how the iPad shifts the mobile user experience paradigm, what this means to the iPhone, and how mobile applications can and will have to shift with it in order to become or remain successful.
Although they share an OS, the interactions offered by the iPad and it’s smaller siblings are very different. We will explore what these differences are, how they effect interaction, and why they demand distinct solutions that embrace and exploit the unique challenges, variations and opportunities between the two in order to deliver enjoyable, satisfying and successful user experiences.
3. Why the iPad matters
(to me)
• Digital sketchbook
• Digital design portfolio
• Design/ document/ web demos & reviews
• Reading books
• Consuming news
• Projector connectivity
• Work at coffee shops
• But, in less than a month, it has become my go-to
device for almost everything but design
7. iPod Touch iPhone 3GS iPhone 4 iPad
600mhz 600mhz 1000mhz 1000mhz
Processor
ARM ARM A4 A4
RAM 256mb 256mb 512mb 256mb
3.5" 3.5" 3.5" 9.7"
Screen
320 x 480 320 x 480 960 x 640 1024 x 768
Wi-Fi a/b/g/
Wi-Fi b/g Wi-Fi b/g/n
Wi-Fi b/g n
Network Bluetooth Bluetooth
Bluetooth Bluetooth
3G 3G
3G*
Format Handheld Handheld Handheld Slate
0.68 kg
Weight 4.05 ounces 4.8 ounces 4.8 ounces
0.73 kg
6hrs/ 5hrs/ 6hrs/ 10hrs /
Battery
?? 300hrs 300hrs Month
8. iPhone iPad
Anywhere & everywhere;
Less distracting environments;
busy streets, boardrooms, public
Environmental transit,
living room, coffee shops, office,
low-interruption environments
high-interruption environments
Engaged, deep interactions,
Fast, quick & dirty interactions, immersive consumption,
Situational open, get what you need & put away organic & exploratory browsing,
focussed task completion
When I need to *___*. When I want to *___*
Psychological /
Relational Personal in sense of Personal in sense of
“mine alone” “depth of interaction”
Personal & private, Public & exposed,
Social/ hidden in hand, on table, or in lap,
Cultural incognito sharing & demonstrating
Anything,
Pre-Existing Smartphone everything,
Mental Model & more
9. What makes the iPad a
category in itself?
Why is the slate format such a paradigm shift.
10. What sets the iPad
apart?
• It's the first mass-market large-scale touch device
• It makes modal UI's work through orientation
• It sits in a new niche between a Smartphone and a computer
• It's a unique casual computer (for now)
• It brings desktop class UI elements to a mobile touch
platform (pop-outs overlays, multi-pane interfaces, fly-in
editor pseudo-windows, etc.)
• UI & physical design lets the iPad get out of the way and lets
users dive deeper into reading, watching, & processing
information & content - the entire device is a display case for
software & content
• It's as close as we’ve come to a WYSIWYG computing platform
11. Benefits of "bigger"
• Less cluttered interfaces
• More content viewable at a time
• Allows the content to BE the interface
• Affords for new, non-conventional immersive
experiences
• Begets sharing / co-experiences
• Allows users to more easily tackle more complex
actions while maintaining the task-focus of the
iPhone
• More usable keyboard (in landscape)
12. Drawbacks of "bigger"
• Distance between interface elements (tab bar to
app header buttons) can reduce efficiency
• Find-ability of buttons can be more
troublesome due to size of element relative to
the screen
• Tendency of designers to use print, and other
real-world object metaphors due to available
screen real-estate
• Give a man an inch, he’ll take a foot
• It will probably get worse before it gets better
13. What does this mean
for the average user?
A new way to compute, to interact, and to
experience content, tasks & communications
14. The iPad will change the way
people use other devices
• The iPad creates a computing ecosystem (create /
find / consume & process)
• Think GTD
• Users will exploit the most appropriate device for
their current need based on how it let's them interact
• The iPhone will become more of an information
hunting, foraging, and collection medium
• The iPhone will be used less for complex task
completion, and more for social interactions,
discovery, data input (photos, videos, 2D barcodes),
and immediate and emergency tasks and activities
15. The iPad will change the way
people use their other devices
cont.
• Perform exploratory and organic web browsing tasks on
iPad
• The iPad is better suited to media consumption, book
reading, web browsing, news, video watching than iPhone
or computer
• The iPad is a shared-experience device
• The iPad, once apps catch up, will become a more robust
task completion platform, taking over more and more of
what is considered currently “mobile” and even "desktop"
domain
• the iPhone will be the input source, the iPad the output
source for the world of information that surrounds the user
16. Devices as lenses
• The device scale and capabilities are
directly relational to their optimal use:
• Desktops/ laptops = Hubble telescope
• Netbooks = personal telescope, cropped
• Mobile phone = macro lens
• iPhone/ iPod Touch = wide angle lens
• iPad = 1:1 - closest thing to paper
17. What does this mean
for App designers &
developers?
How do we exploit the inherent benefits and
variances across the IP3
18. iPad Apps & iPhone Apps
• Some of the most used 3rd party apps on my iPhone
are “app-ified” sites (Facebook, Twitter, Linked In, CIBC)
• None have been synced to my iPad - the full websites
provide a better experience given the size of the screen
• The apps I have installed are more related to watching,
reading, and dealing with media and information
• Many of the first wave of iPad Apps are ports, or simply
scaled-up versions of iPhone App concepts
• Some offer unique iPad experiences, but most don’t go
far enough
19. Some Apps “get it”
• OmniGraffle - a diagraming app that allows you to do
almost as much as the desktop version
• Popplet - innovative visual idea-mapping solution
• Pages - write most of my documents on the iPad now
• Keynote - mapped, created, and presented this entire
presentation
• The Elements - a UX that truly exploits the capabilities of
the iPad
• Instapaper - changed how we use the Web
• Pulse - changed the way we see RSS
• Scrabble - unique iPad - iPhone integration
20. Where do we go from
here?
• Ported iPhone Apps don’t work
• iPad Apps aren’t desktop Apps either
• Desktop Apps, paper, other and real-world object
metaphors shouldn’t work - but may bring more
engaging and playfulness to large scale touch
• Don’t omit features to make products more iPhone
centric, or add features to justify an iPad version:
provide full featured,targeted experiences with
device-specific interaction models
• If we don’t consider the iPad as a unique category of
device, why bother creating iPad specific Apps at all?
21. Where do we go from
here?
• iPad use affords the user more time, patience, and less
distractions than walking down the street using an iPhone app
• Designers & developers need to re-imagine their app
experiences from the ground up
• When designing iPad Apps, think more Norman, less Nielsen
• Simplify. Reduce. Remove.
• Focus the value proposition, focus the audience, focus the
activity. Loose everything else.
• Tailor Apps to not only the unique size, software and
hardware, but the unique ways people can and should interact
with the iPad
• Let users fingerpaint a masterpiece
22. Conclusion
• The iPad is a clean slate
• Users are new to the iPad, but so are designers
and developers
• We're at the tip of the iceberg
• If you're planning an iPad App, ask yourself why
it can only be on the iPad. If you can't answer
that question, stop.
• It's our responsibility to extend this new
paradigm, and take the iPad and slate based
computing to the next level
23. The future is big
Designers & developers will shape this new platform.
It's our responsibility to make it awesome.