There is quite a bit of interesting posts about tablets these days with the introduction of new players such as the Motorola XOOM, ViewSonic ViewPad and Galaxy Tab to an Apple dominated space. This blog post by Jon Stokes talks about how the user’s own hands get in the way of human-computer-interaction when using the tablet and block the view, making things much harder to focus on and decreasing the valuable real estate.
Even if you hate them, tablets are here to stay. They cater to the needs of most people who want to just digest information from the web on the go. Nothing ground breaking here so far but let’s take a look at how this information is actually different…
Some of the most common tasks performed on the tablets are:
- Watching videos
- Flicking through pictures
- Reading the news/magazines
- Consuming social content (mainly looking at bits of text from your updates and sending out bits of updates)
Do you see a trend here? The amount of input required to complete these actions are at most 2-3 taps on the screen. This is the key to designing any user-acceptable software for the tablet: reduce the input to output ratio with considerable think time between user inputs.
Let’s look at some examples of this in games and apps:
1) Angry Birds: carefully calculate what you think might happen, set the bird free (or on fire!) and just observe the impact.
2) Words with Friends: think about the word you will form and then put the tiles on the board with 4-5 taps
3) Facebook: browse through pictures of friends and latest status updates.
4) Twitter: read the tweets of people you follow
This is exactly why I cringe when I see applications like “focused writing” on the iPad. I just cannot possible imagine an adult sitting down and trying to type more then 3 sentences on a 10″ iPad while covering the lower part of the screen with a keyboard, making sure that there are no typos and then with the rest of the attention she has left focus on what she was actually trying to type. Tablets are meant to be information “consumption devices” where large amounts of data are distilled into smaller bits and the user quickly consumes the data and moves on.
This is right in line with how the society behaves in the past 20 years. The progression of people reading books to blog posts to 140 character messages shows us how much majority of people value snippets of shallow information over deep thinking about a particular topic.
The actual work of creating the content should mostly be left to other input devices. So next time you start thinking about the scope of that tablet app, make sure you let the user consume more than he produces.
