Ooooh, you must be thinking, what a posh title this is! Okay, I'll admit to copping a bit of a grandiose attitude when I came up with this, but hear me out on this one.
The iPad has generated a lot of criticism, scrutiny and analysis in recent months. The debate about the ills and assets of the platform have, and will continue to be, debated endlessly. I think one thing is pretty clear though— whether you like Apple or not, whether you have an iPad or not, whether you think it's the most awesome-est thing ever or not, it is revolutionary device. I don't mean in terms of technical execution (yes the A6 chip is a marvel, the power-consumption is amazing, blah blah blah). What I mean is that somebody with Apple's clout finally stood up and threw away the last three decades of user-interface paradigm and they're laughing all the way to the bank doing it.
So, if you jettison The Way We've Always Done Things ™, what do you replace it with? More importantly, which things from The Old Way are no longer applicable to The New Way? This is a big topic that will take some time to settle itself. We've had this CPU/mouse/keyboard setup for nearly thirty years and we're still learning how to make it work for humans. I don't expect us to settle the micro-debates of touch-interface design for quite a while, but I do want drill down to something pretty specific.
Take a moment and ponder what the mouse really is in a graphic user interface. It's a proxy. It's a loosely-connected device where movement and gestures in one space are translated to movement and gestures in another virtual space. To operate a mouse well, you have to perform constant mental transform operations from the physical world to the world you are trying to manipulate on the screen. The mouse is, effectively, a rather thick layer between you and what you're trying to do.
Exploiting the Gap
As we got better and better with the mouse 1 software started to exploit this gap between you and your machine. The first place this showed up was in context menus. Once we already had to make a mental stop on the train ride from our brain to the machine, why not make the station more useful to folks? Hell, let's put in some vending machines, and perhaps some couches. We could even install Wi-Fi and people could get even more productive. Pile it on, pile it on.
Taken to an extreme, the mouse becomes the primary means by which we interact with our machines. If you don't believe me, take a look at any professional CAD workstation or that god-awful OpenOffice mouse.
However these are extremes. There isn't necessarily anything wrong with things like extra mice buttons or context menus. But, in a world of touch, where the mental and physical distance between our intentions and execution is much smaller, that thick layer/opportunity is gone. Context menus? How the hell do I "right-touch" the screen? Mouse-overs? Current touch interfaces don't have any proximity sensors 2—either you touch something or you don't. Yet these two very simple interaction models have become a crucial part of the UI vocabulary we have all acquired over the years.
Think about a mouse-over. What is it there for? Mouse-overs offer two things: a preview mechanism allowing you to learn more about something without having to commit to it, and as a backup when a pictorial icon's meaning isn't clear enough. We don't have these on the iPad 3. So as an application designer and builder, how do we give people some notion of what this thing can do? What kind of affordance can we offer?
Spelunking
As you start using and learning an application, you generally have two questions:
- What can this thing do?
- How can I get this to do ______?
These are asked from two opposing angles, but both are about discovering the capabilities of the software. When a user doesn't know what your application can do, how can you build it in a way that they can discover it? An equally important question is how can they explore your application without having to commit to any action, particularly a destructive one?
Let's look at one of my favorite iPad apps in particular, . A nice feature of the application is the ability to progress through all of your unread items with a single tap. When I first got the app, I knew that there had to be a way to do this, but I couldn't find it. There was a mysterious-looking button in the corner of the screen, but I wasn't sure what it was for. I mean, it might do anything. How was I to know what would happen? It wasn't until I saw a that I actually found out where that button was. You can't really figure out what it does unless you poke it. If you poke that button, there isn't a corresponding "undo" button for that action.
That's not a dig against Brent and Brad, I think they did a wonderful job with NNW. But it does highlight how difficult it can be to convey such a feature to the user. I think it may be one of the biggest challenges on the platform. How do we let the user know what our application can do?
Let's be honest here, if you're relying on documentation to teach the user the basics, you've already lost the battle. Documentation is fine for really deep, detailed information (see OmniGraffle on the iPad for an example). But requiring a user to read the Owner's Manual before they can even use your software went out about the same time as floppy disks. On the iPad an up-front documentation requirement is just laughable.
Little Gets Big
One final thought is that although the iPhone and iPad obviously share the same DNA, the difference in size makes this acutely problematic on the iPad. On the iPhone you simply can't cram that much stuff into an application. Read the iPhone Human Interface Guidelines and you'll quickly get the message that on the iPhone, less is more. By and large, the best iPhone apps simply don't have that many features integrated into them. This gives application designers more freedom to make clear the intent of the features that are implemented.
On the iPad, it's a different story. There's so much more real-estate. Running an iPhone application on the iPad is so laughably awkward that it starkly highlights just how different the platforms really are. So now, as iPad application builders, we have more space than ever. While we're freed from the space constraints of the iPhone, we now have a challenge (and responsibility) to use it effectively. It's not hard to imagine some developers embracing these new green fields to produce some truly awful interfaces. Please, don't be one of them.
Tangents
1. Make no mistake here, we've had to train ourselves to use the mouse. Just watch your grandparents struggle with a mouse and you'll realize how un-intuitive the device really is.
2. I'm not even sure if they did that it would be such a good idea. Requiring that level of fine-finger dexterity immediately makes such a device exclusive to the young and facile.
3. OK, there is a common trick of touching and holding a hyperlink long enough to get a menu of options.