The iPad Experience

Touch vs. Visual

Take a random book
Close your eyes
Open it

You know where you situate yourself in the book. You immediately feel wether the number of pages in your left hand is more or less important than in your right hand.
You flick the book.
You navigate through the book.
You have a touch perception of the global object in your hand.

Well. Lets try with your iPad ;)

Technological gaps always inspire nostalgia. Still. The iPad puts an end to the Touch Perception. Tablets are slimmer than ever, and users are lost ! That’s an interesting paradox for technology historians.

Can’t you see where you are?!

The iPad offers us a new perception of the text. Its screen is a portal to “infinite canvas” — as it’s been defined and illustrated by Scott McCloud. Zooming, scrolling and clicking distract from the sole reading experience (Get dizzy!). And that’s partly why, as designers, we naturally are averse to these gestures.

Instead of one infinite canvas, we imagined a canvas simultaneously displayed on two different scales. New devices are powerful enough to display two different scales of the same text onto one view. The first level is about reading, the second helps the reader navigate.

It respects the classic idea of book’s design in that it maintains the continuity of linear reading. A reader needs calm and concentration to be text-focused. A simple glance at the “flick-view” on the reduce scale of the text (in the right margin) gives an immediate snapshot. Goodbye to the “z-axis”, e.g the volume of a book.

Next, how not to be disturbed by an ugly “zooming” function? The hard choice for a designer is to choose how and when to display those (definitive and only) two scales. First, it’s a matter of relation between the text size of the main text (16pt) and “flick-view” (1.2pt). Again, the main idea behind our two levels of view any distracting gesture for the reader. Why bother with a pop-up menu to keep track of our progress in the chapter, when we could just glance at it?

What about the affordance?

One last thing. The “flick-view” could be enhanced as well with a scroller button. We want the reader to use his thumb, exactly like he would use it to flick a paper-book.
We thus find ourselves with something similar to the scroll of contemporary web browsers. In the right margin of the window, every browser now integrate a small button that gives an idea of a page’s size. The same manipulation metaphor makes sens then, but no one ever thought about using it for ebooks. Designing this scroller object in the “flick-view” helps the reader to get a visual perception of the chapter he’s into. Dragging is the new flicking.