[tweetmeme]The release of the Wired magazine app for the iPad has triggered much talk in the design community. The iPad is a new device, and everyone’s trying to make sense of it. What does content look like on the iPad? We only have had a few hundred years of experience with print, compared with a little over a month with this entirely new platform. The most obvious way is to mimic the tangible objects we’ve familiarised ourselves with.
Apple taken this route with iBooks on the iPad, by simulating real books. You get a single or two page spread, tanned pages stacked over one another, with a real page flip. This is how people have understood books all these years. The Kindle app on the other hand pursues a more digital look, although I believe it too does a page flip animation.
The Wired magazine on the other hand ports the experience of a real magazine, to an iPad. It is the exact magazine that they sent for print, but its UI is optimised for the iPad using special software provided by Adobe (which the public doesn’t have access to yet). The pages are rendered as flat images, while InDesign creates the app that navigational structure.
In many ways, the result is worth a look. For one, there are two separate layouts for landscape and portrait, the transition of which is pretty stunning. Even the ads have two separate layouts, so holding the iPad in any orientation leads to a perfect view. Wired has incorporated interactivity throughout the mag, with videos, and 3 dimentional VRs that you can spin to have a better look. The typography looks stunning.
The one flaw that’s immediately noticeable, is navigation. You swipe left to progress topic by topic, much like any other card based UI seen on the iPad. However, when you hit an article that’s more than one screen tall, you have to swipe up to reveal the next card at the bottom. There is no indication when there is more content at the bottom, so you’re left swiping up on every page, hoping to find something new.
The most intelligent and comprehensive critique on the Wired app has been put forth by Oliver Reichenstein for Information Architects[1. For a very thorough and intelligent follow up to Reichenstein's article, follow the comments on this flickr photo.]. A snippet:
The iPad portrait mode allows for a nice column width with enough white space left and right. The landscape offers even more white space. Why not use it? In a medium with infinite vertical space there is no need to create dense multi column layouts—Yes, multi-columns look classy-classic but so do heavy black rotary telephones. In practice, multi column article pages are as useful as heavy dial disc cellphones.
When I first read through Reichenstein’s piece a few days ago, I immediately assumed a negative stance. Why should we have to give up how a magazine looks and feels? Columns have worked in print for so long, why not use them on the iPad? It looks good. It looks good because all the websites we see are single column scrolling layouts. A magazine feel on the iPad is quite different from reading a website. Feels luxurious, classy, and good. It feels like content worth consuming, where you know that text has been carefully laid out by a person, rather than a computer parsing through text. [1. The sixth issue of the SA mag practically reeks of print design ported to the iPad. Hopefully we can leave that out of the discussion for now?.] But how is it really for reading?
As I was perusing through the Wired app-magazine—searching for answers—my attention was caught by a piece by Nick Carr, about how the internet rewires our brain to be distracted. I remembered reading it in Instapaper just the day before. It’s a well written piece, and I thought I should attempt reading it again on this next generation magazine. The Wired app version certainly looked better, but as soon as you’re a few lines into the story, it’s apparent that its two-column/three-column layout was nowhere near Instapaper’s readability, with generous single column, whitespace, font size, making a huge difference. The text in the Wired app is readable, but it wasn’t as good an automatically laid out page rendered by a computer parsing through a web page. With that, Reichenstein had won me over.
You can click to enlarge the image, but this really needs to be experienced on device.
When I think of a magazine, I picture a set of pages tightly crammed together making use of every inch of space to provide you some useful information. But the iPad is not a magazine. It’s a platform to deliver information. Before that the magazine was your delivery platform. It’s time to drop years of paper and ink saving tactics, or cutting paragraphs because it doesn’t fit into the page, and of not ‘wasting any whitespace’. Because it doesn’t matter. We’re moving into a new era now. The iPad is dynamic, it’s interactive, it’s fresh. It’s time to rethink how we deliver content to this platform.
What does information look like on the iPad? I don’t know. Does it scroll, or does it paginate? What fonts does it use? How does one present advertisements? I don’t think anyone knows this yet. What I do know feel so, is that multi-column magazine layouts ported to a digital tablet are not the future (hopefully).
Perhaps we need to slow things down, and take them one step at a time. There might, after all, be some right in what Apple, Wired, New York Times and others are doing. I’m reminded especially so by this piece by Neven Mrgan (tackling Marco Arment’s piece on ‘Overdoing the interface metaphor‘):
Remember Mac OS X v10.0? It was to be a significant departure from the flat, dull look of the OS’s of the time. It overdid that: the buttons cast comically large shadows; the pinstripe texture is crazy opaque; everything is far too shiny. Today, Mac OS X is flatter, with tasteful touches of depth and volume. To get here, they had to start there.
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There’s an excellent video of the application in use (the real one, not the early wired version) on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EcbEXnNvlZo
Hit enter to quickly there. You raise some excellent points in your article. We’re on the precipice of something, but no one knows just what that might be yet. Our natural inclination is to revert to what we know, so the iPad is drawing a lot of parallels to magazines currently. But, the iPad could be so much more than that, and it’s way too early to draw new conclusions. I can’t wait to see how the iPad evolves, it’s going to be pretty exciting times.
Enjoyed this post. just today we discussed the Wired App at the office. We all bought the app and played around with it. Then someone asked who had actually read an article. None of us did. We were all too busy flipping pages, watching videos and getting used to the interface. ‘That can’t be good?’ someone concluded.
Then I thought back to the first time I got handed a paper Wired magazine. I flipped through it and it was unlike any magazine I ever read. I couldn’t tell where stories started and ended. Sometimes text was barely readable because it was on printed on fluorescent background and I had a hard time distinguishing the content from the ads. I felt lost.
It took me a while to get used to the format and design of Wired Magazine. Then i started to enjoy it. Now I love it.
Give the App a chance. It might grow on you.
With nod to both Joshua and Boris in the comments here: Wired on the iPad is the first “decent” attempt at “magazine-style presentation” in a new era of exploration on tablet form-factors. The print version of Wired is much easier to read today after years of experiment, feedback, and iteration.
I read Oliver Reichenstein’s post and, in spite of his being a design expert, felt he was jumping the gun. I, reservedly, agree with his current assessment, but devices and their capabilities are moving at a breakneck speed and they will improve quickly (in the next two years) in resolution and font rendering subtlety. His missive seemed unnecessarily smug and dismissive in tone, even though he provided ample metrics and examples for his criticisms. I’m sure he’s not capable of designing a device, with current specs, to accomplish all he criticizes on the iPad and Wired implementation. It shouldn’t be assumed that, if he is correct, that state-of-the-art is slogging along and somehow the status quo. The tablet world is the “next big thing” and Moore’s Law has moved us nearly to the tipping point of exponentiality. The next ten years, should we all survive, will really be something. (p.s. I’d look more favorably on his article if he didn’t so tastelessly grovel for business at the end of it.)
There are always giant, entrenched forces at work in the tech marketplace. They all have (paid) “friends” in the media. The lesson of the iPod has made clear, to all big tech empires, the stakes involved. When you read anything today, it’s best to be mindful that, like any market, there is a loser for every winner. That means there is a lot of FUD to wade through, at the behest of those seeking to catch up, lest they die.
To smokingapples and Miland Alvares I’d say, that’s a pretty big proclamation to use in a headline but, then, you were aware of that, I’m sure.
How much presentation do words and pictures on a page need?
How far do you have to stretch to justify content as an application?
Really, people are discussing the implementation of words and images and video on a page in terms of an application?
I’m going to go with justifying an application. Justifying jobs and attempting to justify a business model broken by the very blog you are reading this on.
Words on a page, words on a page.
What does the incredibly popular Instapaper do?
Strips all the bullshit out of a page and leaves you with the words.
THAT’S an application.
@Ian Wright
I fully agree.
Magazines like Wired are designer darlings on ego trips.
Do they get attention? Yes.
Are they readable? Hardly.
I saw a vid about the making of Wired, the app (sic). Their director let slip that, in their thinking, ads were it and content was really just an afterthought so the dweebs would buy the mag.
Ooooh yes! That’s a very telling statement.
Sadly there are enough dweebs around for them to have a viable business model.
For me, understatement and readability are the key.
The darlings on their crack-inspired layouts can go play with themselves. If I pay, I expect content, not distractions intended to make me overlook the signal lack of content.