Why iPad Apps Should Be OK Usability-Wise on a 7.8-Inch iPad:
A 44 point target on a 7.85″ iPad would be the same size as a 44 point target on the iPhone (0.27″). Millions of people use the iPhone every day, and have little trouble tapping a 0.27″ target. As Apple has pointed out, their fingers do not change size when they move to their iPad.
(Via Daring Fireball)
This is all well and good from a theoretical standpoint, but what someone needs to do is print out a bunch of iPad screenshots at this new 7.85″ diagonal size and tap around. I have a feeling it would feel more cramped than either Gruber or Bernstein are imagining.
Sure, it may work for simple list apps, like mail, and todo list managers, but a lot of apps go through great pains to make explicit use of the iPad’s real estate. The more power-intense content creation apps, in particular, the ones with lots of custom gestures, are going to suffer.
When we design iPad apps, we aren’t just doing math. We test the layout on the screen, tapping buttons, sliding our fingers around, etc. Sure, we follow the 44-pixel guideline in general, but often we add more space, move buttons around, etc. as a reaction to how it physically feels on the device. If you just go and shrink everything down, it will have an impact on the experience.
So even if iPad apps will technically “just work” on this new device, I wouldn’t be so sure that the experience would be great in many cases. So a lot of designers would want to target this physical screen size and create our own versions for it, anyway. Which is fine, as long as Apple gives us a way to do that.
Maybe iPad apps will “work” out of the box, just like iPhone apps work on the current iPad. But the better apps will be the ones to customize specifically for the smaller screen? Who knows?
Or maybe this smaller device has more reason to exist than to simply be a cheap gateway drug into the tablet world. I’m not sold on the idea that Apple will put this device out there simply to eat Google’s and Amazon’s lunch. Maybe there’s a lot more to it than that, and the 7-inch form factor will be targeted at a very different purpose.
