So I finally got around to trying the Ipad. I’m not yet decided on whether or not I want to buy one, but I sure do like the experience. And the experience I find drives the following points home, that I think can be applied to building stuff for the web:

– Purists can say what they want, people love stuff that moves and zooms and slides around. I tried the Wired application and I loved it. For those who haven’t seen it or videos about it, there’s a video here.

– Zooming around is all nice, but once you’re on the content page you’re interested in, animations become annoying. So to counter balance the point I made above, animations are good to help people navigate, to inform, to train, but once you’re there, stop!

– Content is king. The ipad has only a simple black frame, with one very discrete button. So once you’re looking at that content, there’s nothing else that distracts you

– Ads can be of interest. In the Wired Ipad app they’re even beautiful and it’s nice to look at them. This starkly contrasts with Le Monde, a newspaper whose content I like but who shoves blinking ads at me as much as it cans.

– It should be as easy as possible to buy stuff on a website. Amazon has done it well with One-Click. The Ipad has made it really easy to buy.

Finally, as customers have been asking me for flipbooks for the past few years, I just know that they’re going to be asking for sliding content viewing.

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