Macadamian Blog
User Interaction and the iPad
Interacting with the iPad is different than interacting with other devices.
Think about other technology for a minute: your computer has a keyboard and a mouse, each of which has many buttons. Your TV has several buttons on the TV itself, in addition to a remote with even more buttons. Your car has a wheel, several pedals, various knobs and buttons on the dashboard, and a variety of handles and switches. I could go on, but my point is that most of today’s gadgets have many single-purpose controls. Each device has a lot of buttons, and for the most part, each of those buttons perform one specific action.
What makes the iPad special is that it relies heavily on the exact opposite: one multi-purpose control. Almost all of the user’s interaction with the device is done through a single multi-touch screen that does all sorts of different things. While there are a variety of gestures the user can perform, it’s always the one screen that is used as the input channel.
Let’s take a deeper look at gestures.
Different gestures may mean different things to different applications. For example, a horizontal swipe in Mail deletes a message, while that same gesture is used in iBooks to turn to the previous page. And iBooks also uses a two-finger swipe to skip a full chapter at a time, a gesture which does nothing in Mail. Already we can see that gestures are not interpreted the same way in every application, and that not all applications support the same set of gestures.
This inconsistency leads to a very interesting user interaction problem: users have no way of knowing which gestures an application supports, or what a particular gesture will do in a particular application even when it is supported. Consider how annoying this is for traditional gadgets: have you ever tried to reprogram the clock on a VCR DVD Player and wondered which of those finicky settings you have to tweak to get to the time setting? Or whether it was even possible? Surely such a problem could only be worse on the iPad, with an infinite number of possible gestures.
As it turns out, this “problem” is my favourite feature of the iPad. I like trying to guess which gestures I can use in a given application. I like discovering hidden features by accident — much like Easter eggs in other software, it’s rewarding. I like when the software is one step ahead; it knows what gestures I’m most likely to try, and tries to support those actions where it makes sense to do so.
More formally: I like when applications are so well designed that they are completely and utterly intuitive to figure out.
That’s what makes the iPad special; it forces developers to design their applications specifically for an interface unlike those found on other devices. Applications for the iPad must have high affordance and high discoverability in order to succeed, and the resulting user interaction is fun, engaging, and completely unparalleled by anything else on the market.
