ellen kanner

I bought an iPad this week, about 4 days after they came out on the market. By belief, I am not an early adopter of technology, just don’t feel enough of the bugs have been worked out. I’m a user experience and interface designer, so am intrigued as well to visit the user experience of this device. And, since I was looking for something, small, portable and lightweight (dare I say a Mac version of the netbook), this fit the bill.

Multitasking

I learned some new things about multitasking as a human being – when the option isn’t there, I focus. The iPad makes me do this because switching between applications breaks my train of thought as I wait for the application to load. However, multitasking will be a new feature coming in iPhone OS 4, so I’ll be back in the saddle again.

I used the iPad this week at a conference where I was taking notes on it with Evernote, twittering with Tweetdeck, checking email on occasion, looking up discussion topics on the web in Safari, and bookmarking to delicious. It wasn’t bad, and again, forced me to focus on one thing at a time.

The Keyboard

I’m a “Thumber.” Period. That means I can type pretty darn fast with my thumbs, something learned on my Palm Treo, which I further developed on the iphone. In portrait view – it’s just easier. Landscape view it’s a bit wide, but if I can put the iPad on my lap and let my fingers fly in traditional typing mode, that works too. So the keyboard is much better than I expected. My wrists do get a work out from holding it up and thumbing in portrait mode.

Remember the Microfiche?

Well, I used to get motion sickness when whizzing through microfiche on those projectors back in college, and have had the same experience several times when installing apps, navigating the iPad and watching movies. I think it has something to do with the amount of space the iPad takes up within your field of vision as well as vibrant patterns behind whizzing icons. I switched to the “slate” background and it’s been better.

Note taking, Google Docs

Google docs are an interesting experience.. and not at all editable like on a laptop. Spreadsheets are also interesting on the iPad and are turned into an editable form. They’re not easy to edit but it’s possible. I’m debating about buying Pages and Numbers. The three apps, including Keynote are $9.99 a piece through the App store.

Evernote is Awesome

Evernote is pretty darn slick.. super slick in fact. I’ve been using Evernote for about a year now and love the tool and the iPad app is very nicely done and now have it syncing with two laptops, an iPhone and the iPad.

Watch Movies on Netflix

The iPad app for Netflix is fantastic. I can watch streaming Netflix movies like I do on my laptop. Pretty amazing, and crisp. So watching a movie in bed on the iPad is pretty darn comfy.

Streaming Audio through Safari

Though streaming off of Pandora or the Public radio Tuner isn’t possible without the ability to multitask, one thing I can do is play streaming audio through Safari while using other applications on the iPad, something that is possible as well on the iPhone and iTouch but that I had never tried. THAT was very cool.

Location Aware

It does amazingly well with finding my location on wifi. I was impressed when I loaded the Weather Channel application and it knew my location.

Apps Cost More

So if the device is bigger, the apps must cost more, right? Right. For some reason prices compared are 3x, 4x or more expensive than the iPhone version. I don’t understand this as the functionality doesn’t appear to be more but the apps cost more.

Books

I still like paper books, but there’s something nice about being able to read in bed at night, in the dark, without a book light. I’ve started reading books off the Guttenberg project using the Stanza (iphone native) app and it works fine as one can decrease the text size and fit more on the page with the iPad. It’s nice to have a library of ebooks at your fingertips, when you’re hanging out in a waiting room somewhere with a table of unappealing magazines in front of you, just whip out the iPad.

A few random ramblings:

You can fit 6 app icons in the dock. Handy.

Too bad flash isn’t supported as Aviary.com would be very useful over wifi.

Pcalc is a great calculator for free as the iPad doesn’t come with one, nor does it come with a clock application. I picked up a free one of those too.

It is super slick, did I say that already?

The BBC, The Weather Channel, and the Bloomberg apps are very nicely done and beautiful on the iPad.

The iPhone and iTouch apps that haven’t been recreated/updated to iPad versions aren’t too pretty. I’m sure versions are coming.

Reading PDFs I had saved to Dropbox doesn’t work too well as that app has not yet been recreated to an iPad version.

You can not print from the iPad… not yet at least.

Do I miss having the ability to connect to the Internet from anywhere at anytime on 3G? Not yet as when I’m using the iPad I’m usually sitting down somewhere, usually that has wifi (home, campus, hotel, coffee shop).

Motion sickness! Did I say that?

And it is lightening fast to load stuff.

So far I have not missed having an always-accessible internet tool with the iPad (3G) as I tend to use it in the house, at work, while traveling and any place I’ll be siting awhile, usually that has wifi. It is not an iPhone mobile device, and how I use it is not the same.

Overall, I’d say the iPad is a “lite” productivity tool, good for travel, reading around the house, and simple tasks. It is by no means a replacement for a laptop but handy accessing recipes in the kitchen, reading books in bed at night or keeping in my purse. Pictures and movies are beautiful, the touchscreen is nice and all the apps I have make life easier without really any troubleshooting and that is what’s going to make this tool fly.

I had a discussion the other day in a room full of programmers and system administrators where the conversation migrated to how usable a tool should be, in this case software, if it were a complex system. The argument from some in the room was that, “hey, it’s a complex system, it will be complex to the user”, to which my response was, “Really?”

Several examples came up of how very complex systems – be it a software application, a car, the human body – appear to be fairly easy to use by the user. A driver of a car does not need to be an automotive engineer, a baker does not need to be a mechanic to fix his mixer, nor do we all need to understand how a software application is built to make it work for what we need it to do. A user needs to understand what the tool offers and what they can achieve from using it. If one doesn’t understand the possibilities of how to use Photoshop or Illustrator, for example, then they will not understand the benefit of the tool. What a user doesn’t need to understand is how to get Photoshop setup on their Mac – set up should be simple and make logical sense, in layman’s terms. If every time we had to go into the shell account of our computer to install a software application, the industry of the web and software world would not be what it is today.

As web design, development and software programming professionals, we owe it to our users to make what we build as intuitive to the user as possible. If not, we’ve lost our user, a client, and the point. The most successful and appreciated products and software applications on the market are simple in the hands of the user.