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Written by Simon Bennison
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Friday, 28 May 2010 11:40 |
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When our new iPads arrived at the office today it was our first chance to get to see one up close and try it out for the first time.
Of course, Apple are great at building a buzz around a new product, but often it’s only when you actually get your hands on something that you get a sense of what it’s really like.
My first thoughts are that it will have a huge impact on web design. I know it’s been criticised for being essentially just a bigger iphone, but when you use it this scale makes a big difference to the way you interact with it.
First thoughts:
- Above the fold has a new meaning.
- Websites will need to get more tactile.
- Flash websites will lose out.
‘Above the fold’ is a web design term that refers back to newspaper design, where the key news of the day, the key selling point of the newspaper, is placed on the top half of the page – ‘above the fold’. The same applies to websites, on which you don’t want visitors to have to scroll down the page to find your new information. On the iPad, this will change depending on whether you’re holding it in portrait or landscape. I expect this to create a shift in web designs with both landscape and portrait viewing in mind.
I also think websites will need to get more tactile. There’s a big difference between dragging or pointing at items with your finger and using a mouse and a pointer on a monitor. This is a big opportunity for websites to become more interactive with the way you touch them. I hope to see some great design ideas coming out of this.
Lastly, and it’s an obvious one for tech enthusiasts, but the iPad doesn’t support Flash. So there’s a multitude of websites out there that won’t be accessible on the iPad. This is only going to frustrate users and perhaps this means less Flash websites are going to be built, unless Apple does a u-turn and decides to support Flash on the device.
I’m opening up the comments of this blog to more ideas – designers, developers, marketers, web users… what do you think the iPad will mean for web design?
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What I'd love to see evolving in the near future is variable resolution - so as you zoom further and further in on an area, smaller and smaller content becomes readable. You can view a showcase of this technology on ted.com - http://www.ted.com/talks/blais...synth.html. This could really revolutionise web design, as even a large scale site could be easily displayed on one page, and navigated using the intuitive pinch/zoom and touch scroll.