Design compromise, usability, iBooks and Apple

I hear many people complain about the “cheesy” book binding and page metaphor in iOS iBooks and other similar UI choices Apple have made in iOS and OS X Lion. I think iBooks is a special case… here’s why.

Such an interface is called skeumorphic. No I didn’t know that term until recently either.

I will say for a start that I love the iBooks page curl as you turn pages – because it is so impressively done. The page curl in e.g. Kindle for iPad doesn’t come close. It isn’t as interactive (limited axes of movement) and is much slower. This destroys the illusion.

Apple’s implementation is a prime example of “surprise and delight”. For those that care, at least. It must have been hard work getting such a high frame rate off that dynamic page curl code. These people know what they are doing.

However, the wider issue here is that the “wow” element of the implementation may well just be Apple engineers making the best of what has been asked of them.

What I mean here, is that the book metaphor was likely not chosen so they could show off a page curl. It is there for one reason only. Books have pages.

The entire concept of ebooks needs selling to the rest of the world, not to geeks. Geeks like pressing buttons to advance things. They think “realistic” interfaces are lame. It may well be that many people at Apple think so.

However what is Apple’s goal? It’s to sell e-reading to the masses, not the geeks. MG Siegler has had the similar realisation in terms of the entire iPad offering (hmm, wasn’t it obvious from the start when iPad was announced?).

With this in mind you need a drop-dead intuitive user interface. You are also re-framing something that already exists in the real world. Therefore the sensible thing is to supply the same visual cues to the user (recommended reading: The Design of Everyday Things).

If you present a novice user with a straight rendering of an ebook page with no chrome, unless they have used something like this in the past they cannot know for sure how to turn a page. There are too many options:

• Swipe left or right
• Swipe up or down
• Tap left or right
• Tap and wait to see what pops up
• Try to find a button to press
• Shake the device until something happens [AKA curse the geeks who designed this crap]

This is why there is a single visual cue in iBooks – a simple bitmap added which instantly gives the user an idea of what they can do and how they can expect it to work. The page edges:

Now, think about the implications of this. Once you add this simple image to the edge of your display the user is intuitively shown that page traversal will be horizontal.

The user then has an expectation that they can turn the page with their finger, after all that is what other objects (real books) they have with these page edges showing do.

This means you have to implement a dynamic page curl, whether you think it is cheesy or not. It needs to be a shit-hot one or it feels worse than a real book, not equal or better. Remember the sell here is “ebooks are better than real books, they are the future”. The benefits of ebooks are not that they do not have pages – they do – it is that they are portable, searchable etc. Real books have great navigation built in.

This page turning is a necessary introduction for novice users that becomes a major feature and development effort, because it is commercially very important. You need great visuals for everyday (non-geeks) to be impressed by what is essentially a document viewer.

For advanced users, and those new users who start to become more adept, it supports tapping on the left and right sides anyway which users will discover over time. There is no need to go through the effort of swiping – unless you like playing with the effect, which I certainly do because it is a joy to behold.

Unlike the Kindle app’s one which is laggy and feels like you have pages made out of heavy cardboard.

So what I’m saying here is – though I will not pretend to be able to read the minds of Apple – I am pretty sure that this was part of the thought process, it makes perfect sense.

People think Apple are all about design. Apple are all about the user experience. That means that what you see is not always an expression of the best design taste, or even what they themselves would think is the nicest presentation.

Its about the best presentation for everyday non-geeks, who are the people slapping down dollars hand over fist to buy the iPad – not the Android geeks who are still waiting for a non-iPad tablet that’s actually useful.

Usable design is not about elegant zen-like perfection – it’s about making things that people are comfortable with and can use without learning much, if anything.

The page effect on Address Book in OS X Lion however, is a different matter. It serves no purpose except to stop the app looking quite so dull as it did before. Unless there are touch-capable OS X machines out there we don’t know about…