Will the iPad usher in a golden age of UI design?

When people talk about the future they were promised as kids they often say, "where are the flying cars?" The iPad is the flying car of consumer electronics. It's the exact device that the futuristic movies and tv shows have always promised us and now it's here.

Personal computers (both Mac and Windows-based) have gotten a lot easier to use and many people are now comfortable with them, but let's not kid ourselves: computers are hard. Even Macs. Want proof, Apple nerds? Try using search in the Finder. It's painful. Macs "just work" when the user already has a certain familiarity with the basics of personal computing.

The operating systems we use today are still based around the office-oriented concepts of files and folders. I suspect that's because when Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) was creating the first GUI they were imagining the office of the future, not the home of the future. We've lived with that for twenty years because home computers still did mostly the same things that office computers did.

Fortunately we've been freeing ourselves of the office idiom over the last few years. Thanks to the MP3, the iPod and the Internet, we've seen the gradual shift from the computer as spreadsheet-and-word-processing machine to a true information appliance. The iPad could potentially fulfill the promise of the original Macintosh.

This is where it gets fun for designers and developers. We are now free to ask a really interesting question: "what do regular people actually want to do with this magic tablet that can basically do anything?" Yeah, we know that they'll want to watch movies, play games and surf the Internet. But what else? And when we figure out what they want to do we, the designers, will get to figure out the easiest and most intuitive way to do it. My mind boggles at the potential for rethinking everything we've become accustomed to when designing user interfaces for the web.

Some of you might be saying, "but isn't it just a big iPhone? What's the big deal?" To which I say, "YES! Exactly! It's an iPhone that's big enough to show lots of information. What more could you want?"

And please don't say "Flash."

P.S. I think Apple missed a great opportunity when they called it the iPad rather than the PowerBook or the iBook.

Comments

[David Jacobs]

I agree. It also could have been called simply "the MacBook," since that model is barely alive.

[sara girlscantell]

i completely agree, except i think they didn't call it powerbook because they already made a gizmo called powerbook? (iBook would have been worlds better!)

[Joe Adonis]

Switch the "a" in iPad to "o". See...clever.

[Chris Basey]

I think that there's an exciting future ahead with the introduction of slates, tables, whatever you want to call them. The iPad for me is a giant bowl of 'meh' - I feels more restrictive and the I don't see the boundless possibilities you do. A crippled OS forces certain UX and UI constraints and limits the ability to push boundaries. I think gen 3 will be great and this clearly plants the flag in the ground for tricorders. It will no doubt be successful, but I'm more interested in the HP slate than this giant iPhone

[Jim Ramsey]

@Chris -- My problem with the HP Slate (at least as I understand it) is that it runs on Windows 7. I think the crippled UI in the iPad is what makes it so interesting because it's much more consumer-oriented than OS X. I hope that people who feel overwhelmed by Windows or OS X (like my mom) will be able to use the iPad and so designers and developers will have to create apps that are that much more intuitive and easy-to-use.