Usages of iPAD

So we have new iPAD, iPAD 2, iPAD 2 3G! Phew! That’s a lot!!! But what do we do with this new luxury iitem? It is a gadget that can replace a number of other products. I am sure there must be some really wonderful usage of the iPAD. Here is a compilation of some iPad usages from internet and own experiences.

1. Surf the Internet

iPad is the best way to experience the web. View whole pages in portrait or if you may like it, in landscape on the large Multi-Touch screen. And let your fingers do the surfing. You can sync your bookmarks from your Mac or PC, and add even more right from your iPad. Besides, MobileMe keeps your Safari bookmarks in sync on your iPad, iPhone, Mac, and PC - wirelessly and automatically. So no matter where you go, you'll always have the most up-to-date information at hand.

2. Games

t's great for playing simple little games. There are many free gaming applications for the iPad already. If you're willing to pay for games, then there are many to choose from, many are made specifically for iPAD.

3. E-mail

It's ideal for checking e-mail and sending short e-mails, especially when you're on the go. There's nothing like the Mail app on iPad. With a split-screen view and expansive onscreen keyboard, it lets you see and touch your email in ways you never could before.



4. E-reader

With the new iPad. you can access all of the books on Amazon, just like a Kindle, but the display is much bigger. You can view your book in portrait or landscape, and the way the pages flip is awesome - you flip it with your finger and it looks just like a real book.

5. Photo storage and viewing

The iPad is great for storing and viewing your photos because of the large display and the way that you can flip easily from one photo to the next, and jump between folders with ease.

6. Music

The big, beautiful iPad display lets you browse your music collection by song, artist, album, genre, or composer with the touch of a finger. See your music as full-size album art. Flip through all your albums and tap to choose what you want to hear. iPad makes music look as good as it sounds.

7. Recipe book

It's great to have in the kitchen with you when you need to follow a recipe since it takes up much less space than a laptop. There are many great recipe websites, plus there are many free apps related to recipes and cooking.

8. Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) i.e. Skype

The iPad has a speaker and built-in microphone so it's ideal for making phone calls over the Internet, and watching the video as well in iPAD 2! Tried this recently and absolutely loved the experience.

9. Movies

Great for using on airplanes or even at the gym, the iPad has a big screen and is great for watching films, especially when compared with a cell phone or an iPod.

10. Weather & News

Apart from e-mail and Internet, this is probably what the iPad is most used for at our house. There are plenty of great apps for quick news and weather reports at your fingertips, many of which you can customize to your own interests.

Do you have more ideas/ usages? Go on…add here.

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Dissecting Discipline of Designing Experiences

Often I come across different viewpoints on Experience Design discipline about what it is and what exactly experience designers do. The executioner’s (in software business) school of thought is that experience design is the practice of designing technology products and services (each of which is a human experience) based on the consideration of an individual's or a group's needs, tasks, desires, beliefs, knowledge, skills, experiences, and perceptions. Thus, it results into achieving certain user goals and leads to a successful system acceptance by users.

The other school of thought is more at an abstract level that defines experience design as a discipline of designing mental journeys that leaves the customer with memories of having performed something special, meaningful, engaging, with sense of achievement or just fun and entertainment.

Like any other discipline, I think experience design can also be understood as an organized production system that is about creating output in the form of desired experiences using available inputs such as knowledge and ideas, and finally using resources in the form of design processes and skills.

Let’s take an example of thematic restaurants. Today, food is more of an experience rather than a necessity, as only a minor part of the average income (approximately 10 per cent) is spent on food.

Dining is a combined body and mind (sensory) experience and has aspects of culture and society. The body tastes, smells, sees, hears, feels and digests the food. The mind reads the food consciously and unconsciously in the form of activated emotions and memories.

Theme restaurants are cautiously designed to deliver customer experiences by influencing customer’s state of mind with the right ambiance, environment, lighting, music/live performance, and personal service on top of the food served to stimulate emotions like happiness and so on. A great deal of skills and processes are required to accomplish delivery of such desired experiences in the restaurant business.

Another example could be watching theater, which is another form of immersive experience thoughtfully crafted for audience. The stage performances are scripted around a theme to entertain and educate audience (selective sometimes) by stimulating emotions such as anger, happiness, surprise, confusion, and more.

The two examples mentioned above can help us dissect different aspects of organized experience delivery system.



Core Activity
The core activity is what a customer wants to accomplish as a task or an activity. For example, watching a play in a theater or eating in a restaurant.

The Concept (or the ‘Feel’)
The core concept is the theme that the customer admires and what the product stands for. For example, a concept “Happiness is in small moments of life and must be shared” is the theme of Unilever ice cream brand and is well translated into the design of ice cream packaging and ice cream vending machine designs where in a customer is delivered ice cream when he/she smiles into the face recognition system. See demo

Peripheral Experience
Peripherals are supporting experiences (part of the overall customer experience) to which a customer initially pays extra emphasis. For example, the way seating is arranged, welcoming gesture at the entry, cleanliness, and so on.

Core Experience
Core experiences are activities in which a customer gets involved physically and mentally. For example, taste of the food, dialog delivery of an actor, sound and music and so on. Developing core experience is a skilled job and the output is actively consumed by customers. However, core experience cannot be appreciated without a good theme.

Support Services
Support services are materials such as cutlery, menu, and order delivery that are used to accomplish the core activity.

Such a dissection would help in understanding design and delivery of experiences. In my next blog I will make an attempt to explore how a similar approach can be applied in design for software applications.

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Content Publishers Going ‘Tabletized’

Newspapers were the first to realize the power of the Web to communicate instantly with their readers. Now being mobile-enabled has become increasingly important for them to stay relevant today. And as if it wasn’t enough of a problem to choose the right platform (Android, iOS), device capability, or to choose between mobile Web and native application, things have become more complicated with penetration of tablet devices (though there's no competition to iPad yet).

Tablet devices will become the biggest point of influence as to how users will interact and consume digital content. Companies such as BBC, FLUD, Wired, and many more already have their iPad native application available on Apple 'sApp store. CNN, Reuters, ESPN, SPIN.com, and NYTimes.com have made themselves aligned to iPad Web browsing experience.

However, the strategic choices will become easier for digital content publishers if they try to understand how different stakeholders of the publishing industry will deal with content in future.

Native Experience of Information

The first advantage of creating a native application for iPad is the richness of experience the app provides. Designers seem to be designing apps more as amalgamations of games and info-graphic interfaces and less as task-driven interfaces. Native applications can make good use of device capabilities such as camera, accelerometer, gyroscope, voice and motion sensor, and GPS and add to the overall experience of the application which is difficult to achieve on browser-based app designs. While some amount of offline browsing and location aware services are possible using HTML 5, it is still not possible to access some of the native capabilities of mobile devices from browsers due to security and privacy concerns (for example, access to address book or calendar).



The Wired iPad app is a beautiful example of static magazine content being made available in a highly interactive and multimedia-based content delivery format, without compromising on the magazine’s original free flow content designs, large visuals, large advertisements, and silky smooth page flip transitions. However, in many ways the content is confusing and unusable because of non-obvious controls, unintuitive interactions, and game design thinking. Read NN Group report on usability of iPad apps and websites.

Hybrid Experience of Information
Publications need to think — Does reading infotainment content always require such rich multimedia experiences? What about serious content readers who would want to read articles for hours? Does it make more sense to have subtle and clean reading experience for them?

Financial Times has designed a hybrid version of Web and native applications for their website (app.ft.com), optimized for an iPad. The website exploits HTML5 capabilities to load content in the background and provides a newspaper's page-after-page flip reading experience that is completely browser based. Users can easily differentiate the content reading experience from traditional Web content rendering without compromising the subtle simplicity.



Richness of Content is Expensive
Rich content comes with its weight and each bite of space on the iPad is expensive. Single copy of Wired magazine consumes half a gigabyte of storage space on the iPad before one can use it. Data on mobile is still expensive; downloading a copy of Wired using the 3G iPad connectivity would easily cost a fortune in many countries along with the time that it would take. And all of it will impact the end user experience.
Natural Digital Content Interactions Are Missing
In many ways native applications' designs reduce the user’s natural tendency of reading and interacting with the digital content. Features and controls that users use in browsers are not available (for example, copy text and photos and share it with friends by pasting it in an email). Features like bookmarking and printing pages are not available unless they are built seamlessly within the application.

Access and Reach
Digital content is highly search driven. To access a certain publication's content, users may use any of the search engines or they may find it via links from other websites, blogs, Twitter, and/or links embedded in emails. However, the mobile native apps currently do not support such navigation. So, if a publisher's marketing strategy is to increase the number of visitors and not bother about the repeat visitors, it makes sense to go for mobile optimized Web, especially if it is viral.

Media Advertising Means Money!
Advertising has been a primary source of revenue for most media companies across platforms. For a decade, it was believed that ‘Web users are ad blind’ and they don’t care about ads. At the same time, there has been a significant growth in various media companies' advertising budgets year after year. It’s time media content producers rethink about advertising.
Designers and marketers of traditional Web have worked on aspects like ad slots, positions, sizes, context, level of interactivity, personalization, and more but now iPad can potentially sail them far ahead in time. Ads designed for Wired app are more persuasive by being highly interactive. Perhaps there is scope to make them more meaningful, information exchangeable, intelligent and personalized by adding context sensitiveness. Advertising of such kind will certainly provide better branding mileage to advertisers and also the opportunity to get richer data in bargain. It might just be advertisers who will push publishers to go ‘tabletized’.

Editorial Control: Rigid vs Flexible vs Time to Publish
For publications that are in the business of providing real-time digital content, it is important to package content and keep updating it (for example, coverage of elections or scams). It becomes utmost important for the editorial staff to have flexibility and control over the content and presentation. Native application takes away that flexibility and control because of rigid content meta data structures and templates. Due to cumbersome maintenance and update routines in native applications and app stores, any change made to the app design can take weeks to happen. The work includes programming, testing, approval process, and then finally the end users have to actively choose to update the app. Mobile Web apps, however, require limited programming and testing, hence always providing users with the latest content and experience.

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Content is King

"People don’t read, especially when it comes to web and mobile" - I said that!

 

 

Content is important:

• Content adds value
• Content is part of user experience

And it is becoming increasingly important with the 'Mobile First' design philosophy coming into power. But, much of the mobile first design philosophy fails due to one big reason: CONTENT

And CONTENT failure is not a new phenomenon; it is to be seen even in web specific designs. If, we go to the root of the problem, then it is the different user behavior on web and mobile.

Keeping this in mind here are some guidelines to create content. These are applicable not just for Mobile but for web as well: 

1. If first 160 characters do not sound meaningful, rest of content cannot be useful!

With reducing attention spans, one needs to impress the audience with the first 160 characters. If an idea can’t be put in short, there will be no one listening to it. And if there is no one listening then an idea is useless. So, it makes more sense to put in all the skills to make that 160 character impressive!

2. If everything is useful, then everything is useless

Yes! There has been no mistake in the above statement. If one thinks that everything is useful for a site’s target audience, then surely there has been a mistake. Usually, we tend to fill in so much content, that everything seems to be useless and a person tends to drift away.

3. Use scan-able keywords

Every user opens a site with something in mind. If that is not scanable or searchable then it is highly unlikely that the user will stay for more.

4. Start with conclusions and recommendations

Inverted pyramid style of writing is the key for every content on web and mobile. People want to know quickly about everything; no one has time to read on and on….

5. Attention grabbing headings, meaningful subheadings

Headings are to get attention and subheadings are to make use of that attention span. Keeping a subheading simple, without jargons and to the point helps to gain trust as well. Jargons, complex terms, clever lines are meant to be for the Main heading, keep them out of the rest!

6. A picture is worth 1000 words, but we don’t want 1000 words!! Do we??

The intention is to keep it simple, neat and easy to download. A picture may seem to be the best option to give a visual appeal and represent an idea, but it increases the size. And with download speeds varying unpredictably, sometimes, pictures are a blot to user experience.

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