And it required them to build a mockup of the iPad, because they didn't have access to one at that time.
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Much of what the developers learned about how to create apps for the iPad came during the design process, which required many versions of their ideas. That realization influenced how they thought of the mental "cost" of moving between areas on the iPad screen and how it would be different than the same movement on a desktop screen. Developers found it was easier to "touch" back and forth between two points on a screen than to mouse back and forth. "Drawing with fingers is well suited to a touch interface," Case said. That's true even though common iPhone gestures, such as double-tapping, pinching and others, are likely familiar to many users by now. "Even if it took two seconds or more to open an inspector and tap a button in it, this was more approachable to a new user than having to learn a new set of gestures," he said. But the designers found those gestures sometimes meant more cognitive work for the user, who might have trouble remembering which gesture did what. "When we first started, we had a large library of multitouch things, like a four-finger swipe for use like a key modifier, to put in," Van Hecke explained. "There were some things we wanted to put in but backed off of - and hope to put in later," Case said. That's in addition to making use of the iPad's multitouch capabilities, which expand on those of the iPhone. That tight schedule, he said, made Omni really think through "the core things we're trying to do with the app, without introducing a lot of clutter." We're looking to bring our iPhone apps also, but later."
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"For this round," he said, "we were looking first to bring our Mac apps to the iPad. "We think we ended up making this app more usable on the iPad than on a laptop."Ĭase noted that his team had just 62 days from the initial iPad announcement in late January to design and test the app and get it through Apple's App Store approval process.
"It was a good exercise in getting rid of our excess chrome ," said Robin Stewart, lead developer for OmniGraphSketcher.
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But on the iPad, that felt like wasted space - screen space was more valuable as free area for drawing. Initially, says Bill Van Hecke, Omni Group's UX lead, the company thought it would need to use every pixel on the iPad's 1024-by-768-pixel screen: "It was our first impulse to fill up the space, but we found in the design process that it was more important to see the content." As a result, he said, the user interface on the iPad for two Omni apps, OmniGraffle ($49.99) and OmniGraphSketcher ($14.99), takes up the same percentage of screen real estate as the company's iPhone apps.įor instance, initial interface designs for the apps included a sidebar that would show open documents and allow quick navigation among them - a feature not unusual on desktop interfaces. It's a larger iPhone the way a swimming pool is a larger bathtub." "There's room for content, and interaction with gestures, that you couldn't do on smaller real estate. "First, we really found that it's not just a larger iPhone," said Ken Case, founder and CEO of The Omni Group. In particular, I wanted to know more about whether it confounded their initial design plans, or whether they were surprised to find new possibilities for user functionality. I spoke with UX designers and product managers at two companies - The Omni Group and Zinio LLC - to find out more about the challenges they faced developing for the iPad. A properly designed iPad app is not just a pixel-doubled iPhone app, nor is it a desktop app with the mouse replaced by a finger. Apple's recently released iPad is no exception despite some snark that "it's just a ginormous iPhone," developers of iPad apps have found that the size does matter - and that's in addition to the iPad's unique multitouch functions and interface elements.
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