Even more thoughts on the iPad: Print vs. Web. →
In my last post regarding the iPad, it took me 15 paragraphs to ask a simple question: why haven't I seen any really great (newspaper or magazine) website dedicated to and fully optimized for the iPad? I'd like to add a few aspects regarding the "print vs. web" thing now.
I just read a very interesting post entitled Understanding iPad, which took 28 paragraphs to come to the following conclusion:
Flaws and all, the iPad is indeed in a class all by itself. It's a new kind of computing device
It's very extensive and has a lot of background info and details about current computing platforms in general. According to the author, the iPad is made to consume, not to contribute. And it's hard to categorize. But for me, there's still no answer to what the iPad actually is. Not that I need that answer, maybe it's part of the magic not being able to nail it down. But what I know for sure is that it engages me with content in a way that I haven't experienced before and that I can't really verbalize.
I'd like to write on the topic of "Print vs. Web" on the iPad, which correlates with this ambiguity.
A lot of publishers of print newspapers and magazines are currently releasing content apps that are highly reminiscent of print design. They probably do it because they want to be visible on the platform as soon as possible, or because it's what they can do best, they don't know better, or because they don't see the iPad as a screen, but a discrete canvas such as paper. We don't know.
On the other hand, there are the web people complaining about that. Oliver Reichenstein of Information Architects has made some evident points on why multi column grids and the usage of non-screen fonts are making iPad applications such as the WIRED app quite hard to read and enjoy. All in all, there are a few people asking why publishers aren't releasing their titles on the iPad as … websites – the modern way of treating digital content. There's a lot about how this new breed of newspaper and magazine apps is "a step back in history".
While I fully agree that slightly adapting print titles and pushing them to the iPad as "interactive slideshows" or enhanced PDF-Readers is not really the way to go, I'm also asking myself what this actually says about newspaper and magazine websites. I went into detail on that in my last posting, but seriously – how many really compelling websites for major publications do you know? Didn't we all excoriate them before we had this new iPad content apps thing to rant about?
My point is: why shouldn't there be any good and well established design principles from printed matters we can elaborate and adopt for something like a multitouch-enabled slate device with highly responsive direct manipulation capabilities? Just because the web is digital, does it need to be the blueprint for anything digital? Does digital design always need to correspond with the loss of control?
Many of us used to complain about typographical restrictions on the web, longing for (and even inventing) mechanisms to extend the limitation. Now there's more typographic richness in an iPad magazine app and – no matter how weak and flat the production quality might be (text layouts as PNG graphics) – we also find reasons to lament about that. For sure, there are technical restrictions to the iPad screen text and rendering engine that make weak readability for a lot of fonts. But isn't there a bigger picture to look at – the screen technology might be very much improved even with the next generation of the device. The iPhone currently has 480x320 Pixels with 160 Pixels per Inch. The next generation of the screen is rumored to be 960x640 Pixels, two times as much and which would lead to a much higher density given the fact that the iPhone can't really become any bigger.
From a user perspective it's quite irritating that currently, most newspaper and magazine apps have different navigational models. Some use scrolling, some let you swipe from page to page within an article, others use horizontal swiping to move from article to article, some add a lot of arrow icons doing a lot of things you pretty often wouldn't have expected to function the way they do. Just as with the familiarization of the WWW – which made a good portion easier to use, but also more boring to experience – the best principles might evolve and become standards. Like Amazon did for e-commerce (and a lot of websites beyond that category). Or apple.com for product presentation.
I have thought a lot about the question if I prefer scrolling or page swiping to move forward within text. And when talking to other people I often recognize how this might in the end really be a matter of taste. That's why I like how it's a user preference in Instapaper for iPad – long articles can be continuously scrolled by swiping vertically. But you can also the the behaviour to paginated, which means that every swipe (or tapping left or right of the text body) leads to another page. And I have to say that I even switch between those two modes and I need some further evaluation to understand when and why I do it.
Something that I really liked about the WIRED app was how within an article, no matter at what position you currently are, the layout looks great. And when I'm using Instapaper on my iPhone, eg. for commute with many breaks and reinitialization of my cognitive apparatus, the paginated mode helps keeping track of where I last stopped (and there's not as much accidental scrolling).
And really, tell me whatever you like, I still love the idea of issue based magazines. It's not only a technical thing, it's also an intellectual concept. Compare it with music albums and you know what I mean. Most print magazines are, from a content perspective, compromises though. A lot of different things are being cramped into an issue – some things that need to be up-to-date are really having a hard time in bi-monthly magazines. So actually, most magazines rather compare with compilations (to stick to the music thing). A magazine in the sense of a musical album could also be topic or theme based smaller issues – monolithic content bundles on an irregular basis …
So what I really like of what I experience with the iPad is how it challenges a lot of things. It's really not that much about what an iPad really is or could be, but what it does to storytelling and how people perceive and interact with content. Regarding magazine design, it questions print and web design at the same time. It challenges magazines as a format and I'm looking forward to a lot of exciting things happening down the road. iPad or not, both print and web design need a refreshment.
