ERGOSIGN Blog

Introduction

When Steve Jobs announced the iPad, he emphasized Apple's embracement of a new third segment of devices, right between the smartphone and traditional computer/laptops. The target hereby - at least in the beginning - lies in the home context, in which content such as websites, photos, movies and books is primarily just consumed passively.

From a user interface designer's point of view the iPad as such is particularly interesting in three ways:

• With the iPad Apple sticks to the same interaction paradigm as on the iPhone: Except for the Home button the interface is completely touchbased. However now the size of the iPad's display provides enough screen estate to avoid the frequent collision of controls and artefact happening on iPhone, especially in games.
• The temptation to twist the current passive character of the iPad into more active content producing scenarios is immense. This at the same times raises quite interesting constraints and challenges for the touch-concept. Especially the correct estimation how soon touch-interaction with the device gets inefficient and un-ergonomic for example when entering text, will be crucial.
• In the medium term the iPad can integrate usage scenarios in the home context, that until now were distributed across several devices. This directly inclines tasks such as checking email (previously done e.g. on a Blackberry), surfing the web (previously done e.g. on a laptop), reading ebooks (previously done e.g. on a Kindle) and media consumption (previously done e.g. on a HD-recorder) etc...

Overall the iPad stands representatively for a huge exploitable potential, especially for us user experience designers whose brain cells never stopped buzzing since Steve's keynote.

In the following we sketch two usage scenarios, which highlight the advantages of such an (integrating) tablet in the home context, which might even be shared by multiple family members.

(Disclaimer: Of course we are aware that there were similar devices and concepts before the iPad. But judging from the current media feedback, it is safe to assume that - just like the iPod and the iPhone stand for a fundamental change in the music and smartphone businesses - the iPad will revolutionize the tablet-business.)

Scenario #1: Personalized Radio for Father Homer

Until now Homer turned on his radio every morning to start the day with good tunes mixed with news and the weather update. The only problem is that either the taste of the DJs is questionable or the frequency of news is too low.

With our new radio.app this service can be tailored much better: Countless semantic connections through custom artist-tags, neighbourhoods of shared musical taste, individual news-intervals are just a few benefits to mention.

Besides its light-weight portability the tablet bears a key advantage in this scenario by leveraging its touchbased interaction. The interface scales beautifully with the complexity of the usage context, starting from trivial (Start, Stop) to precise gesturebased navigation through the tag cloud by zoom & pinch. Furthermore different views can be switched through simple swiping in the upper half of the screen.

Scenario #2: Interactive Learning for Daughter Lisa

Lisa perceives the static representations in her physics schoolbooks way too abstract thus extremely boring, which reflects directly into her grades.

With our new learning.app she is now able to view all experiment setups from different perspectives, zoom in and most importantly replay them as movies at any speed.

The advantage of gesture based controls in this scenario is obvious: Besides directly tangible manipulation of the view angle, the level of represented information adapts naturally by zoom & pinch. Furthermore the setup itself can be re-arranged on the screen by dragging its parts just like in real life without any indirect interaction (mouse or keyboard).

Eventually this natural interaction makes the physical laws for Lisa transparent and conclusive. Any error in her setup gets highlighted instantenously both in the calculations (bottom screen half) and in the schema (upper half) via live simulation.