The iPad reminds me of the early days of the Internet, before there were established best practices. Back then, “Wild Wild Web” was a commonly uttered term. UX professionals were passionately and actively exploring brand-new features and interfaces, and continuously testing and learning to discover what was inherently intuitive and engaging for those exploratory new adopters.
The iPad reminds me of the thrill of those days, because so much is open to being discovered and explored. Of course the iPad carries through its Apple predecessors’ infamous touch scrolling, which in itself has a learning curve for new users. But once you start playing with some iPad apps, it’s thrilling to discover that each one has taken the freedom to reinvent the experience. The features, navigation and interaction of USA Today is very different from BBC News. With eReading, how the iPad’s iBooks interacts vs. the Amazon Kindle for iPad are almost polar opposites. And each game app is almost unrecognizable from the next.
As you can imagine, this could make the heads of users spin – but not if the interaction and experience are done right. In general, iPad users are incented to explore and be delighted by their new, pricey toys. There aren’t a lot of iPad apps out there, when compared to an iPhone or other popular smartphones. So users are more likely to want to pay off their overall iPad investment, and play with each app a bit, and learn a new interface, more than they would with more established media. And these users are more likely to expect something new and different is going to happen.
And there are new possibilities to explore with the iPad. Critics say the iPad is just a bigger iPod touch or iPhone, but providing about four times more real estate truly allows the iPad to revolutionize the touch pad experience. Since the iPad isn’t constrained to being carried in a pocket or small purse, users can read more easily, see and engage with more features at once, and have more encompassing interactions. Plus the user can continue to shake, tilt, blow, slide, just as before.
With all of these factors mixed together, UX professionals have a great opportunity to ‘recharge’ themselves with iPad app design. It’s a perfect media to serve our innate passion for making experiences work intuitively. With little best practices or standards, what is intuitive, engaging and takes full advantage of the iPad’s features requires deep training in understanding a user’s cognitive processes, without relying on the crutch of best practices. A UX professional can enjoy exploring and defining the numerous ways the user can manipulate the experience, how the interface responds, and how to take full advantage of a user’s incentives and capabilities.
As fun as it is, this isn’t to say that I’m endorsing the iPad overall. It holds lots of possibilities, but no technology is perfect. You can’t read well in direct sunlight, it’s hard to figure out some of the general settings such as sound, and it certainly ain’t cheap. But hopefully both users and user experience professionals can get a lot of fun exploration and reinvention out of this new technology, with a renewed passion that can trickle into other, more universal, digital media as well.