In preparing to design for the iPad I wanted to get a bit beyond the images I’d seen of emulated page turns, or pages being flicked and scrolled (as in the NYT demo) or the all singing all dancing Wired extravaganzas. Well it won’t be long now when we can all test our imagined experience on real iPads. I hope to get one in my hands next week.
All of these myriad ways to deal with stories on a digital surface got me to thinking about how people have used text for the last few millenia. There has been talk about this being a moment as significant as Gutenberg, which is probably true, but people have read text for far longer. and the two main ways of reading pubished words have been on a tablet and on a scroll. Reading a discrete chunk at a time or scrolling. So let’s think back over time…
For inpiration I headed off to the British Museum. I had seen a facscinating exhibition about Babylon there 2 years ago, and almost bought something from the giftshop which caught my eye. This time I came away with a small tablet — a facsimile made from a mold of a Sumerian clay tablet. It is lovely, much smaller than the ipad, about 77mm tall and 70 mm wide, or 92mm diagonal. Too small for getting much onto one screen — and only one screen. This one records the sale of a male slave and a house in the town of Shuruppack. It then lists the six witnesses. The tablet is 4610 years old, from 2600 BC
What I love about it is it’s thing-ness. You hold it in your hand, feel it’s substance, and if you can read it, can get from it a significant set of facts. It has echoes today of the process one goes through conceptualising an app. Focus on the task at hand, whether it be reading or using the text to complete a task.This tablet does the one thing, and I’d need another tablet for another thing. With an app each screen has to enable you to focus on the one thing, not offer a complex set of options which dilute your experience.
iPad gives you a lot more space than the iPhone, but still one must be able to focus on the central task. When we read we only focus on the words in front of us. Our brains maintains awareness of the others but they are blurred. Likewise in iPad as in iphone, there is no need for everything to tell us what it is all at once. We can go elsewhere for more information, but this shouldn’t be a laborious task. it should feel natural – and then we can easily come back if we want
The other thing about this clay object is that the marks on it — made so long ago in the clay — are clear, descriptive and evocative. They were made deliberatly at a time when recording like this was not commonplace. These qualities, of deliberatiely made marks which evoke a good experience for the user and make great use of the spce available are also what I try to focus on when desingning a user journey and the things the user will enconter on that journey.
Two things I have discovered looking around my (foamboard) ipad, it is almost the exact same size as my large Moleskine notebook – the perfect companion to those trusty paper tools of the trade. And there is an inherent grid – or should I say the dimensions neatly translate into a grid which works in portrait and landscape – which is never accidental when there great designers around like there are at Apple.
There was an interesting cover article in Wired this month, asking 13 people for their opinion on the ipad. In it they include a sidebar of tablets through the ages with a clay one at the top. Weeks after my visit to the British museum it was good to see others exploring the origins of tablets and writing. In the article, I particularly liked the piece about how pilots have used tablets for awhile for their ability to be up-to-date, allow easy data input, display graphics and tons of paperwork all in a small package.
And finally with only 2 days to go I see interesting and very positive reviews (Via the Guardian and Macnn) popping up in my twitter feed and Netvibes. I particularly like Stephen Fry’s piece for Time which manages to get in a bit of Apple history, a chat with Jony Ive (focussed on detail as usual I’m glad to see) and with Steve jobs. Stephen has his iPad and clearly loves it.
I want to replace my foamboard with a real one — bring it on!