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.
by Alain
07 Jun 2010 at 23:17
So are you going to buy one ?
by admin
08 Jun 2010 at 09:01
I think I’ll wait a bit It’s already a cool object but I’m always wary of first versions. Then when all the tech doodz around me have one and don’t even brag about it any more, I’ll get one. You might remember what a crappy phone I had, I’m more of a late adopter than an early one.