iPad - Design without Affordance
Thursday, June 10, 2010 at 11:56PM I've now had a lot more experience with the iPad. I continue to thoroughly enjoy using it. However, I'm going through a similar experience that I went through (and blogged about here) with my iPhone
initially. The experience is one of thinking that certain things just don't work only to learn later that there was a hidden user interface feature to carry out some action that the user had no way of knowing about. I had concluded that certain websites were simply not enabled for the iPad and I thought it weird that they hadn't done anything about the problems given the popularity of the iPad. For example, several parts of Facebook simply didn't work such as the list of friends. The problem was scrolling the list of friends. When I tried to swipe down on the list, the way you scroll down everywhere else on the device, the page would move slightly but the pop-up layer would move with it but the list of friends would stay put. Regular users of MacBooks would have a clue as to what to try to get this type of list to scroll but everyone else is left in the dark. I asked a number of other people about this and nobody that I found knew a way of scrolling lists like the ones on Facebook and we just assumed the site was not appropriately enabled for the iPad.
It was colleague of mine that finally clued me into the solution - the two finger swipe. I just tried it tonight and it worked! While I'm glad that I now know how to do something that is pretty basic on the iPad, it got me thinking about Apple's overall strategy of designing without affordances. The overall assumption is that the various touch actions are intuitive and, as a result, it is so much more efficient to not clutter screens with affordances like scroll bars. To Apple's credit, most of the touch actions are intuitive. However, the problem is the set of touch actions that are not intuitive and how users are supposed to find out about them. I admire Apple's commitment to its design principles for virtually all other aspects of the design of this device but that purity of adherence to the principles does have its costs and this is one of them.
affordance, design, iPad, iPhone
Reader Comments (5)
It's even a bit more curious that they didn't come up with an affordance for this given that they already have a mechanism that could be used to reveal a hidden gesture. For example, in iBooks, a fast way to scroll through pages is at the bottom of the screen. But as you read, it becomes hidden. Tapping on the screen brings it back. Perhaps something like that would have solved this problem.
That's a really good point, Stan. The single tap could bring up UI features appropriate for that screen and still not clutter the primary UI. The number of these UI features available at any point may still be quite large so the single tap display may be too cluttered but this certainly seems like a great way to proceed here. I doubt that Apple will go down this path, however, given the desire to be so minimalist in their design. The iBooks inclusion of the single tap guidance may have been a response to specific customer feedback according to a summary that Steve Jobs gave at the most recent key note he gave. If we're going to get this type of feature more pervasively, it may require significant customer feedback requesting it.
The number of these UI features available at any point may still be quite large so the single tap display may be too cluttered but this certainly seems like a great way to proceed here.
I am amazed at how many times i find new tricks on my ipad after months of using it. Yes.. i suppose i could read the manual - but where is the fun in that :)
Danny - iPad Case Review
That's a good point, Karel. Just today, in a UCD class that I teach, we were talking about affordances and a student who works at an Apple store pointed out that there were a number of missing affordances for the iPad. Not having an iPad nor used one in depth, I was surprised.