Soma Design

As usu­al, Apple’s newest cre­ation has pro­duced opin­ions. The rhetoric of those for and against it is pre­dictably strong and, occa­sion­al­ly, ridicu­lous. I don’t care to add my voice to the din. My atten­tion is more fix­at­ed on the fact that if the iPad is suc­cess­ful, we’ll have to say good­bye to a whole host of assump­tions as we say “hel­lo” to a new era of touch com­put­ing. What does this mean for web designers?

Goodbye Mouse, Hello Hands

How much of your site depends on mouse hov­er states? Hope­ful­ly none, if you’re com­mit­ted to acces­si­bil­i­ty. But, chances are there are parts that labour under the assump­tion that every­one is—and always will be—using a mouse. If touch com­put­ing replaces the mouse + key­board par­a­digm that’s dom­i­nant today, there’s going to be a lot of scur­ry­ing to retro­fit web­sites to be usable by folks get­ting their hands on your site. I know that I’m not going to make any­thing rely on mouse hov­er states from here on out.

But that’s mere­ly a tech­ni­cal hur­dle. There’s a fun­da­men­tal dif­fer­ence between an inter­ac­tion with your screen medi­at­ed by a mouse and reach­ing out and touch­ing some­thing. Your web­site will no longer have clicks; it will have users touch­ing, pinch­ing, swip­ing, rotat­ing. In short, the touch expe­ri­ence is flush with poten­tial for a rich­er, more tex­tured inter­ac­tion par­a­digm in our web­sites. Touch might be as large a par­a­digm shift beyond today’s web as the web has been over print.

Goodbye Landscape, Hello Portrait

Com­put­er mon­i­tors have always had a land­scape ori­en­ta­tion. This has only become more promi­nent in recent years as we moved from ubiq­ui­tous 4:3 ratios to var­i­ous widescreen for­mats. In short, we’ve had ample width and short heights. (Thus the reli­gious wars over “the fold.”)

But here we have a 3:4 ori­en­ta­tion. Por­trait. Does por­trait encour­age ver­ti­cal scan­ning instead of hor­i­zon­tal? What does it mean to relax about how high on the page our cen­tral con­tent is? How many assump­tions about how the web works do we have that are based on the land­scape orientation?

You might wish to inform me that the screen can just as eas­i­ly be used in land­scape, but my mon­ey’s on peo­ple using it in por­trait more often than not. But even that abil­i­ty to choose has big impli­ca­tions for our assump­tions about design­ing for the web.

Goodbye Flash, Hello Web Standards

Vir­tu­al ink is being spilled with aban­don over the iPad and Flash sup­port. Flash gained trac­tion because web stan­dards were defi­cient in 2 core areas: video and ani­ma­tion. HTML5 has the video ele­ment, and ani­ma­tion via can­vas, SVG, CSS ani­ma­tions, and plain ol’ JavaScript can do 98% of the things that Flash is cur­rent­ly used for.

More impor­tant­ly, web stan­dards can do 100% of the desir­able things that Flash can do. Those tech­nolo­gies aren’t yet sup­port­ed by every brows­er, but they are sup­port­ed by Safari, and that’s all that mat­ters here. And are you real­ly going to miss those punch a mon­key ban­ner ads?

The two things pre­vent­ing Flash’s demise are 1) momen­tum and 2) author­ing tools. The for­mer is shift­ing thanks to the iPhone and iPad, and the lat­ter is bound to change.

Goodbye Fringe, Hello Mainstream

Brows­ing on the iPhone can be frus­trat­ing when the con­tent you’re look­ing for is all Flash. Oth­er times the site has sim­ply been over­ly opti­mized for the desk­top and/or Inter­net Explor­er. Some may blame the device, but as the iPhone con­tin­ues to grow and the iPad emerges, it’ll be busi­ness sui­cide to have a poor expe­ri­ence in the mobile sec­tor. Let’s face it — users with enough mon­ey to spend on an iPhone and/or an iPad are exact­ly the types of peo­ple that most busi­ness­es want to appeal to.

In short, web design­ers who under­stand how to design good web expe­ri­ences for these plat­forms will only become more sought after. And this just might allow me to jus­ti­fy an iPad as a busi­ness expense.