Why the iPad is not for web browsing (yet)

The conclusion is counterintuitive: Mobile Safari is great, right? It transformed mobile browsing by bringing a robust, standards-compliant, usability-focused browser to a handheld, an act that’s still not easy for the competition to follow. The iPad scales up this experience to something approximating the desktop experience, so shouldn’t it be even better? I don’t think so. In fact, I’d say it’s the worst of both worlds. At least for now.

This fine article at RoughlyDrafted details how Flash encourages interaction conventions that are incompatible with touch, meaning Flash’s absence from the iPad runs deeper than Apple-Adobe politics. The analysis is spot on, but it’s only the beginning: The problem goes far beyond Flash. The web in general—from Yahoo to Facebook—isn’t designed at all for touch. It hasn’t been so much of a problem on the iPhone, whose ability to display and navigate desktop-targeted sites was so vastly superior to its predecessors that this didn’t matter, and is still a welcome fallback for when you need access to a site but lack access to a desktop. But the iPad’s scale invites one to think of its Mobile Safari implementation as a desktop web browser, which it is, substantially, far from.

Touching what isn’t there, and other UI paradoxes

Daniel Dilger’s aforelinked article points at Flash specifically for the frequent use of touch-incompatible mouse rollover events that it engenders—but take a look at the rest of the web. Look at Yahoo’s home page: Several major interactive components won’t work in a touch environment, from the rollover flyouts on the left to the news hovers in the center. Look at Facebook: Numerous parts of the UI, such as the selective hide options in the feed, will never appear unless you hover over their contextual elements.

Which is to say nothing of other mouse-based UI conventions that won’t work, such as drag-and-drop. How will you pan a Google Maps-style field when your drag gesture is already used for page scrolling? If a site starts in minimalist mode like Google’s home page, how would you know what’s there if you don’t have a mouse to nudge? Much of the debate over Flash’s absence from the iPad and how it spells doom for Flash’s future is misplaced: You won’t be getting used to the blue Lego tiles because your use of standard desktop sites altogether will be minimal.

Under construction

Ultimately, It’s a bit like the uncanny valley: The iPad’s browser (or any other tablet browser) looks a lot like a desktop browser until you see it close up. But, just like the early days of the mobile web and later of the enhanced mobile web, this is one more opportunity. Tablet-targeted web content, that targets fingers instead of mice, is probably a good investment right now. And just like on the iPhone, desktop sites will be accessible on the iPad as a fallback. You’ll be able to read news sites and blogs in reasonable comfort, but the real web action on the iPad and other tablets will be versions of sites built for the third screen.

You’ll still use your handheld device for the mobile web. You’ll still use your desktop for the desktop web. The web the iPad is intended for isn’t built yet—but I think it’ll be a fun one to build.

Buzz, Facebook, and social flatland

With the dust beginning to settle from Google’s widely-criticized Buzz launch last week, it would seem the bad assumptions on Google’s part are pretty clear: Google thought it almost certain that you’d like to turn your most frequently-corresponded-with contacts into publicly-visible social networking friends, with only a fine print opt-out between you and any unwanted connections. Or maybe they knew their assumptions were wrong and hoped you wouldn’t notice.

However you choose to interpret the Buzz launch, though, its failings ride on top of a more fundamental problem with the most popular social networks: the entire model of social networking, from MySpace to Facebook to Twitter, is broken. It’s based on the interpretation of database tables, not on how humans naturally interact.

Honey, you forgot this at home

Here’s the problem: The dominant social networking paradigm is completely point-to-point. Our real-life social networks aren’t like that at all—they’re much closer to a hub-and-spoke model. Even from a young age, we meet different people in different contexts. We form discrete groups from discrete sets of people, generally with little overlap. Before the social networking revolution, the only time everyone you know would be present in the same forum would be at major events in your life, such as perhaps the end of it. Now it’s every day on the Internet.

Did you feel that slight trepidation the first time someone outside the first group of friends you connected with on a social networking site sent you a friend request? A vague tingling of memories of a parent showing up at school in front of your peers, or an older brother crashing the party with your friends? That sense is the result of a social flatland—to adapt a UI term from the estimable Bruce Tognazzini, who popularized it in application to Apple’s tendency to reject hierarchy and sorting for simplicity’s sake, it’s what happens when all your friends end up communicating with you simultaneously in the same space.

Unflattening your friends

Social networking sites have made attempts to address the inadequacies of social flatland. From the beginning, Facebook had its “networks,” which at least recognized individuals’ belonging to multiple, discrete groups, even if the groups were lumped together anyway. With the deprecation of Facebook networks, its “lists” feature with per-post privacy is the closest yet to real-life social networks—but the UI for it is far from intuitive and defaults to flatland.

There are some up-and-comers who get it. The closest thing to a real-life social networking site may actually be a blogging platform: Posterous, the email-powered blogging site, lets users create separate, multi-user private blogs and invite users to them. Tumblr provides similar functionality, if not quite as seamlessly. Even Twitter, partly by virtue of simplicity, doesn’t put any major roadblocks between you and multiple accounts to represent you in your different spheres, any of which can be easily made private. It’s not uncommon for Twitter clients to support fast account switching right out of the box.

Then again, it’s often fun to introduce friends to each other. It can be rewarding: Sometimes, the unexpected meeting of mutual friends can be a fortuitous pleasure. Other times, it can be a disaster.

Which is why, all things considered, it’s generally better to make those connections yourself.

The padded desktop

Has it really been only a week since the iPad was unveiled? Perhaps the month’s worth of analysis that has transpired in the intervening days makes it seem longer ago. I think one can wring from the discussion a certain Solomonic prediction: The iPad will fail at exactly what Apple decided was outside its scope, and will succeed at precisely what falls inside it. I don’t see much debate as to how well it appears to approach what is within that scope—only how the scope will increase with time.

Apple products expand scope gradually but deliberately. The 2001 iPod was a music player and a hard drive. The 2005 version could display calendars, play solitaire, display a slideshow on your TV, and run feature-length films. The 2010 iPad is a big iPhone. You know how this goes. But there’s more to Apple’s tablet than its own scope.

Evolution and adaptation

Let’s take a step back. The iPad will evolve, it will influence the design of other tablets, perhaps tablet computing will indeed be reborn and draw significant numbers of casual users away from desktop computing as the iPad’s strongest supporters suggest. But we are not all casual users. We don’t all have needs that can be met by an appliance solution. What becomes of the desktop? It seems unlikely that it should be left to stagnate.

Of course, I have my own ideas on how to proceed. But assuming we’re not ready for that yet, we still have a time of transition ahead for the traditional computer. And despite Apple bringing to market the first direct-manipulation UI for desktop-class applications, I’m not convinced that the tablet paradigm stands to actually replace our old PARC-derived one. Even if there’s a tablet in every home, I can’t see offices replacing desks with sofas to be worked upon eight hours a day. But each side can learn from the other. As we saw with the iPhone and OS 10.5, Apple doesn’t hesitate to adapt things from its appliance UI to its desktop.

XI and friends

The first major step will probably be to take a multitouch mouse for granted: You can see this happening in fits and starts with various bundled apps on MacBooks. If OS XI isn’t a fundamental rethinking of the desktop paradigm, it should at least require a Magic Mouse. Once the UI can make that assumption, there’s suddenly a lot more it can do even with old-fashioned scattered windows—plenty more if you start from the iPhone platform’s modal window approach and combine it with scalable Cocoa Touch interfaces and window tiling. Perhaps a roving-to-mouse-position, local 1:1 touch surface? If Microsoft puts its researchers and its appliance people in charge of a future Windows, we could see similar advancements from them.

Ultimately, the iPad points not toward a future of tablets for everything, but toward the porting of tablets’ successful experiments to the desktop realm. The future of tablet computing is going to make the current desktop feel increasingly inelegant, but it won’t replace it. Their relationship will most likely be symbiotic, leading to new advancements in both realms.