Government open data presents a number of opportunities for citizens, designers and elected officials.

Using the TTC transit system here in Toronto, I would stand amongst other commuters on a cold winter day and watch as someone would step impatiently off the curb, press off their heel and try to get a glimpse of any streetcar on the horizon. After a few seconds, they’d step back with their head to the ground, and we would try to assess their gaze.

As a UX designer, it’s impossible to suppress the natural instinct to observe human behaviour and imagine how I might make peoples’ lives more enjoyable — to me, the question on everyone’s mind was the same, “Where the hell is my streetcar?”

Late last year, the TTC, in a bold and rather unexpected move, made an open data feed available that showed the exact GPS locations and expected arrival times for each streetcar. Just like that, an app that I’d been dreaming about since third-party apps for the iPhone were announced was now feasible.

I spent a week sketching out what the experience might look like, and then assembled a team to help me build it: T+L’s own Jason Sao Bento, and co-workers from a previous gig, Mohammad Kurabi and Jeremy Koch. Within 60 days, Rocket Radar for iPhone was for sale on the App Store.

It’s been six months since then, it’s received some great coverage from the media and has been downloaded thousands of times. I’ve also learned a great deal about not only building mobile apps, but building them on open data sources.

Solve one problem

Prior to Rocket Radar, transit apps offered every piece of information under the sun related to the TTC — schedules, routes information, maps, advisories, RSS feeds and more. There was no focus on what the user was trying to do; instead, it was a data repository.

By their very nature, open data feeds are a raw dump of all information available from the given source. While it can be tempting to consider how to fit all of the information into a user interface, always consider the primary purpose of the app. Just because the data is available, doesn’t mean you should use it.

This was reflected in the information design of Rocket Radar. Throughout design and development of Rocket Radar, I constantly questioned each idea with, “Does this help me find out how long I’ll have to wait for the next streetcar?” If the answer was no, the feature was cut.

For all mobile apps, it’s important to be judicious about context and sensitive to core functions. For open data apps, resist the urge to take a shotgun approach to design.

Clean it up

Open data doesn’t see the light of day easily. It took a handful of passionate people with a bold vision rallying the city and the TTC to shepherd Toronto’s open data catalogue into existence.

Large organizations, governments included, are almost always wired together like a bowl of spaghetti where isolated legacy systems were created for a very specific purpose, and are rarely designed to talk to one another.

As a result, what comes out the other side when a department is ordered to make their data public can be unwieldy at best. Live data feeds might have improper syntax, markup, and change management. Accept it. The quality of the data is a by-product of this environment and in most cases you won’t be able to do anything about it.

It’s the designer’s responsibility to reduce the cognitive overhead of the user, and in this case, it’s taking a mess of data in, and presenting it elegantly in a way that the user can intuitively understand. For Rocket Radar, that meant taking extremely verbose stop names such as “Queen Street West At John Street” at renaming it simply to “John”.

All stops within Rocket Radar are named in the same way that TTC drivers announce them and in some cases even use nicknames that passengers use like “Ronci” to represent Roncesvalles where screen real estate doesn’t allow for the full name. This gives the app a conversational tone that feels welcoming and familiar and helps to speed up the user’s ability to process the information.

Do it magically

Mobile apps require laser-like precision in their focus in order to properly respond to the user’s context. Prompting the user for information and asking them to configure options are just roadblocks between them and what they’re trying to achieve with the app. Mobile apps should ideally provide something of value to users as soon as they are launched with as little friction as possible.

With GPS, gyroscopes and other types of sensors now built in to smartphones, there’s so much that we can gather from users without having to ask them every time, and that’s how Rocket Radar has seen some pretty astounding reactions from users. As soon as it launches, the app finds you, the route that you’re on, the stop you’re closest to, even the direction you’re probably going, and then tells you when the next few streetcars will arrive.

CFRB’s John Downs, speaking about his first experience with the app when he saw a streetcar arrive right when the app said it would, exclaimed rather hyperbolically, “We let out a giant cheer like we’ve seen the first shuttle ever blast out in to orbit. It was one of the most amazing moments of my life.”

We put a lot of effort into making the app as frictionless as possible, making best guesses as to what the user might be trying to do. It was quite technically challenging to figure out how to select the stop on the other side of the street if the user changes directions (since the list of stops for each direction are maintained separately), but for the user, it just works.

That’s why I equate some of the best experiences on any platform to magic, even if Apple has reduced the word to a bit of a cliché; there might be quite a few levers being pulled behind the scenes technically, but to the user, when you deliver an experience that was never possible before in a matter of seconds without them having to do anything, it can really feel like magic.

This past Friday, we had the pleasure of welcoming nightclub sociologist Yale Fox to the studio. Those of you in Toronto may know Yale as a DJ, but he’s since uprooted to New York City and been named a 2011 TED Fellow for his research around why humans love music, particularly its effects on our behaviour in nightclubs.

We’re always interested in looking beyond the digital space to see how other kinds of experiences are being crafted. It’s especially fascinating to me since so much of the work we do is metaphorically derived from physical experiences and environments.

Yale provided some valuable insights into how people respond in environments where alcohol, drugs, sex, status and music are all in abundance. He joked throughout his talk that he won’t be booked at many clubs following the publication of his work, which tends to paint DJs and club owners in quite a calculating and manipulative light.

Play for the Crowd

While the first priority of any DJ is to play for the crowd, Yale highlighted another important responsibility — to play for the bar. To research this relationship, he observed activity at the bar, the dance floor, and the type of music played and found that as songs that people wanted to dance to played, there was a decrease in bar sales.

Experienced DJs have the ability to balance the big hits with slower songs to not only pace the crowd out, but allow people to order more drinks. They were also more aware of their responsibility to the club owners and the bar, rather than just to the crowd.

These multiple stakeholders felt very similar to our relationship to our clients businesses’ and their users. While we pride ourselves on our ability to create wonderful experiences for users, we also need to satisfy business requirements in order to be successful — it’s where the two sets of needs intersect that makes for an optimal experience.

Brands and Music

Yale’s research wasn’t confined just to the amount of drinks ordered in a night, but also the type of drinks that people tended to order. He noted distinct associations given the type of music playing at a bar.

For instance, house music yielded more sales in cocktails and vodka, and rock music tended to result in more people ordering beer. Molson are keenly aware of this, and have invested heavily in this association in Canada with their live concert series.

Brands have always tried to associate themselves with a particular lifestyle or experience, but it was striking to hear how strong this subconscious effect was with people.

In the same way that Coca Cola has invested into their brand to evoke a feeling of home and Pepsi a refreshing, sporty sensation, alcohol brands have a direct tie with a specific kind of music. Your favourite drink and genre of music probably share more in common than you might think.

The Brain

So why do we enjoy dancing at a bar or club with friends so much? Yale explained that dancing to music with a group produces an elevated level of Oxytocin in the brain, increasing trust and reducing fear and anxiety. It’s no surprise that liquor brands want to associate themselves with this physiological response.

Drink makers are so keen to do so that they often give away their product to high profile bars and clubs in exchange for a certain level of exclusivity. Club go-ers leave with subconscious associations between a great night out with friends and a particular brand of liquor. It’s easy to imagine what they’ll gravitate to in their next trip to the liquor store.

Table service at high profile clubs in New York City or Los Angeles usually begin at $2,500 and can easily climb into five-figure numbers as the night goes on. At these tables, it’s all about status and social hierarchy — those with the fattest wallets and most celebrity get the best tables and service and a certain type of bottle on the table says a lot about the patron’s worth.

In environments where our inhibitions are reduced by so many factors, it’s easy to forget that we’re being manipulated in such a calculated way. The practice of designing for cognitive biases and psychology has only recently come into vogue in user experience design, so Yale’s findings were a fascinating look at an industry where primordial psychological responses and biases are exploited with such mastery.

Depending on your level of involvement in the digital industry, you might not have heard of near field communication (NFC) or you’ve heard so much of it you’re starting to wonder if it’s all hype. NFC relies on an underlying technology that wirelessly identifies objects from a short distance through tags that are inserted into pretty much anything. The benefit of NFC over something you’re probably more familiar with like RFID, which is used in key fobs and current forms of electronic payment like PayPass, is that it can send and receive information two ways, where RFID is limited to sending information just one way.

This is a significant improvement over the existing technology because it’s inexpensive, offers an increased efficiency in configuration and pairing, provides instantaneous connection between devices, and it enables interactive advertising opportunities for merchants.

The challenge for consumers

The challenge for adoption is to make it significantly easier and more convenient to use than the typical way we do things already. To become fully accessible, it must permeate our everyday actions in the same way text messages and emails have done. Marty Beard, president of Sybase, strongly believes that “for mobile commerce to take off, industry stakeholders must harmonize their efforts in the same way that led to proliferation of SMS and MMS technologies.”

For consumers to see the value in using their mobile devices as a primary form of payment, it has to find an anchor in their lives and redefine the rituals of their everyday actions. To do this, the NFC forum has developed the three pillars for near field devices: sharing, pairing and paying. They believe that these modes are where it can have the most impact in people’s lives.

The challenge is finding the incentive for consumers to switch from swiping to waving.

For example sharing, like Bump for iOS currently does, allowing you to exchange contact information on the fly. NFC can enable these interactions offline in a more convenient and instantaneous way. It also has the capacity to improve the pairing process between mobile devices and desktops. Imagine no more passwords, bluetooth pairing or router codes. This can all be stored on an NFC chip embedded in your device, and a single swipe is all it takes to verify your digital identity.

The most signifiant pillar is payment. Take Square for example: it enables merchants to accept payments virtually anywhere through mobile devices. The hardware they use to enable credit card swipes is a stopgap implementation—that’s why they’re actively giving Square dongles away for free. Their strategy is less about the hardware they use and more about the service they provide. I imagine that Square would readily adopt NFC-enabled devices when they become standardized and evolve their current hardware solution.

The challenge for merchants

Isis, a partnership between telecom juggernauts Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile, is actively developing the common standard for mobile payments that they hope will be eventually adopted by merchants. The challenge for merchants is putting faith into the added-value that these new systems can provide their customers, like coupons and loyalty programs.

Google has already integrated NFC support for Android 2.3 and is rumoured to be working with VeriFone to roll out point-of-sale solutions for merchants. Gingerbread users on the Nexus S, can start using Taglet right now and take advantage of contactless information.

The rumour mill is undoubtedly churning around the iPhone 5 and if it will be enabled for mobile payments. Some believe that Apple is concerned about the lack of standards across the industry. Yet others claim they have sources who confirm that Apple is looking at ways of integrating NFC into the next-gen iPhone.

RIM is also working on their own mobile payment solution. “Many, if not most, of BlackBerry devices throughout the year will have NFC in them,” said CEO, Jim Balsillie at a mobile conference last month.

Japan has been using RFID-enabled mobile devices for some time and they’re starting to adopt NFC more rapidly than the west. Mixi, Japan’s biggest social network, will be rolling out new features that enable checking in through near field devices. The advantage of this over something like foursquare, is that it will continue to work in areas where GPS and data signals are weak. But the most interesting implementation are objects embedded with tags that can be shared across their network. Imagine reading a booking or unwrapping a new product you’ve purchased, waving your mobile device over it and sharing it as a status update. This is attractive to merchants because they can embed promotional information into their products which can tie into digital campaigns that run on Mixi.

The merchant perspective is similar to Apples. They aren’t ready to adopt mobile payments and take on the risk of a potentially deprecated infrastructure. They’d prefer to wait for the industry to establish a common standard.

The challenge for designers

How NFC becomes adopted is an exercise for interaction and product designers. The idea that physical objects can talk to each other and exchange our personal information requires designers to have a deep understanding of the spatial dialogue in which they communicate. This is just a fancy way of saying that they need to know how things interact without touching. Timo Arnall and Jack Schulze from BERG, are actively engaged in design research, using prototypes, to experiment with the possibilities of near field devices. They’ve visualized what invisible radio waves look like when an NFC chip and reader are in proximity. They’ve been able to tease apart the nuances in the simple interactions involved in waving your device over a reader.

Possible use cases for the mobile wallet

Source: NFC Forum

These are just some the possible use cases identified by the NFC forum. The designer’s goals is to uncover the pleasurable and motivating factors for consumers to use their mobile devices for payment instead of more familiar and established mechanisms. Consumers are comfortable with swiping their cards and there’s nothing broken about it, so adopting a new technology for them is unnecessary. The challenge is finding the incentive for consumers to switch from swiping to waving. As industry practices and consumer behaviour become adjusted to mobile devices as the primary mode for sharing information and digital identities, we’ll start to see an uptake in adoption. But the question remains as to just how quickly we’ll start to see heavy adoption of the mobile wallet in the near future.

When it comes to building a web experience, most of the effort is typically put towards the tactical objectives that aim to satisfy business and user requirements: Users should be able to easily browse products and buy them; The business should have the capability to manage marketing campaigns; Users should be able to easily move laterally between similar products. Every agency, no matter how big or small has to solve these same problems, and that will never change.

However, it’s the execution of these details that makes the difference between a distinctive experience and one that’s forgettable. This week, the Little Big Details blog has been making the rounds in the blogosphere for showcasing clever micro-interactions across different apps and websites. Mico-interactions can be used to enhance a user’s experience, while subtly guiding and persuading them down a desired path.

Mac OS X’s dynamic date formatting and credit card auto-detection are pretty classic examples of micro-interactions that have become widely adopted and even become best practice. On iOS and relatively new platforms, clever designers paved the way with interactions like Pull to Refresh that quickly became not only widespread, but expected by users (and in this case, open sourced).

These types of interactions delight users because they are the by-product of designers anticipating user needs, and going above and beyond to help them through the experience. They’re often so subtle, that most users won’t be consciously aware of them until after they’ve fulfilled their purpose.

Guiding Along & Enhancing an Experience

The concept behind these interactions isn’t new and revolutionary, but the sophistication and complexity of modern sites and apps is making them a necessity in the digital space. Products have been incorporating smart, thoughtful design tactics for years. Thinking even of just a few objects in my own home, there’s subtle yet brilliant features that make life a little easier.

Vacuum cleaners from Dyson have a small hook at the bottom and the top that you use to wrap the power cord around once you’re finished vacuuming. The next time you’re ready to vacuum your house though, the top hook swings downwards to allow the whole bundle of power cord to come loose at once. Cleaning isn’t something anyone’s particularly excited to do, so removing small inconveniences like having to unwrap the cord makes a Dyson a little less painful to use each time.

Breville has won me over with just about all of their kitchen appliances because of this very carefully tuned attention to detail. Their Smart Toaster is a product clearly designed with a great deal of empathy for its user. It includes a button simply labeled “A bit more” that does exactly what you would expect – the bread is lowered to toast again for a few more seconds. Among other features, it also has a “Lift & Look” button, and a progress bar indicating how long is left in the toasting process. As the designers of the product explain, these thoughtful features comes from considerable user testing and feedback.

My headphones of choice in the office here at Teehan+Lax are Urbanears, and aside from delivering some good sound, they have a pretty clever, if unfortunately named feature called the Zound Plug that allows another person to plug in a set of headphones into your Urbanears. It negates the need for any sort of headphone splitter and makes it nice to share a movie or TV show with a friend on a flight or long transit ride.

Ultimately, the sum of all these small features don’t amount to much, but paired with a killer core product they can move a product from good to great. Paul Bennett of IDEO gave a talk at TED in 2005 and sums it up quite well: “…design need not invoke grand gestures or sweeping statements to be successful, but instead can focus on the little things in life.”

We believe that for a campaign to be successful it should have certain elements to capture a user’s attention and involve the user in an active UX. Many great ideas are social, personal, emotional, challenging, surprising, addictive and deliver a clear benefit as opposed to talking about one.

The following campaigns are forward thinking and include elements that determine success:

We have noticed a trend towards using 3D and light projection technologies. For example, Greentomatocars, a Hybrid Taxi service, used laser-powered graffiti in London, England. Magic laser-wands connected to computers projected interactive digital “paint” onto building surfaces in real-time. This stunt appealed to the scruffy nature of the brand.

The new Penki app for the iPhone and iPad, allows you to paint 3D messages and images that are revealed in long exposure photographs. These are not necessarily examples of practical UX, but they are certainly captivating and it will be interesting to see how this technology can be used in the future.

Many campaigns are connecting UX online with physical reality through gaming, demos, check-ins, webcams, QR codes or simply by entering personal credentials. The lines of digital media and reality are being blurred.

The collaboration between Arcade Fire and Google on their single ‘We Used to Wait’ has pushed both music video and product demo into new territory by combining sound, memory, emotion, and mesmerizing effect within a web browser.

Qrapping paper, Interactive-wrapping paper, debuted during the holidays. It’s filled with QR codes you can scan with your mobile device to play videos. This paper is entertaining and encourages addictive exploratory behaviour with more than 50 videos to watch.

Even elements of Facebook have been drawn into reality. Earlier in the year, Coca-Cola Israel brought the “Like” app to life at a three-day festival where teens wore wristbands embedded with RFID chips. RFID Readers were placed all around the village within “Like” signs. Each time a visitor touched their wristband to the signs an update was posted to their Facebook profile page telling everyone what a great time they were having in the village.

Many campaigns depend on real-time executions, responses, and interactions via social media. Real-time campaigns show the user immediate results and who’s being influenced.

Burger King’s Whopper Face video is a great example. This campaign involved creating personalized packaging for Burger King customers. A hidden camera was used to photograph customers who made a personal request on their burgers. A picture of their face was then printed directly onto the burger packaging. The message ‘have it your way’ was delivered in real-time. This stunt on it’s own was just as important as the campaigns ability to be passed on through social channels to get people to really notice.

Check out other notable campaigns from over the past year:

• Google Chrome FastBall
• Halo 3:ODST Launch
• The Conan Blimp
• BMW Cinema Commercial
• Tron Lightcycle Experience
• Xbox- Kinect Launch
• Mitsubishi Online Test Drive

The iPad GUI PSD has been very helpful for designers / developers in mocking up their apps, although in some cases it’s proved a little too high-fidelity. For rapid prototyping we found we needed a more malleable approach. This is when we turn to the iPad Sketch Elements AI. This collection of common iPad elements in a sketch – like style allows us to easily and quickly mock up flows of custom wireframe screens.

Below is a full shot of all assets included in this release.

If you like it or use it, help us out by retweeting it.

Download The iPad Sketch Elements AI Here

Looking for an iPhone version of this file? View iPhone Sketch Elements AI

(Font Requirement: To fully achieve the sketch style, you’ll need Tekton Bold — Found here)

It might not be obvious at first but as you come up with your top choice think about why it’s your favourite. This type of thought experiment may be banal but you gain a lot of insight about yourself based on the brands you like. One question you should ask is whether that brand has created extraordinary value in your life. Did it blow your socks off?

“The highest level of value you can attain is a meaningful experience.”

— Darrel Rhea

At its core brands are all about experience but experience happens at different levels of value. This was Darrel Rhea‘s view at a recent RGD conference I attended. He believes that you can have five levels of experience with a brand.

Economic experiences live on a monetary level like when you get a really good deal on something. Functional experiences have more to do with utility like when a purchase was useful in helping you better understand something. Emotional value is derived from a visceral experience relating to deep inward feelings rather than intellect. A level above those is an identity experience where you acquire a level of status that signals who you are to your peers.

Rhea believes the highest level of value you can attain is a meaningful experience. Meaning is not about significance but about the stuff that inspires you. A brand that’s meaningful aligns with your outlook in life and in some cases might even define you.

Nathan Shedroff points out that all design is the process of making experiences and meaningful experiences are more powerful than price and performance. As designers our challenge is to elevate the brands we work with beyond novelty so they not only become adopted but have a deep resonance with those who use them.

Having spent many years directing design of NYTimes.com, he saw the Web evolve from a landscape of hypertext to one that’s much more interactive and engaging. In many ways, Vinh led the way with his work at The Times and they’ve since become widely regarded as an innovating leader amongst competing publications in a market that, frankly, is struggling to keep its head above water.

With his talk, “Digital Killed the Art Director Star”, Vinh outlined the industry’s journey from a state where new content was published once or several times a day, week or month in newspapers and magazines to one that demands continuous, nearly real-time updates. He argued that this rate of publishing couldn’t sustain a highly art directed treatment and is the reason why we now see sites that have adopted a fairly rigid, templatized structure whose design is content-agnostic, akin to the standard blog layout we’re all familiar with today (Vinh just a few days ago released an update to his for-pay WordPress theme, Basic Maths). Today, nearly every news publication’s online site is powered by a fairly robust content management system that sits underneath just a few dozen or so templates that can contain accomodate whatever content they’re provided.

Dustin Curtis, with his highly art directed articles, might disagree, but then, looking at the irregular rate at which he publishes content, Vinh’s argument seems to still hold true. Social media even further dilutes any existing art direction, says Vinh, as content is shared and aggregated, you’re no longer looking at the design of the New York Times, but the headline designed by Facebook, Digg, Twitter, and a pared down version of the article in Instapaper, among many others.

“Digital publishing and art direction are fundamentally incompatible.”

—

Khoi Vinh

Is art direction in the digital publishing space dead? One could certainly argue that some of the magazine and newspaper iPad apps such as Wired, Popular Science and co. are examples to the contrary. Vinh says we’re in a bubble where publishers are trying to bring their old way of thinking to a new platform, and having used some of these apps, I’m inclined to agree. Wired’s iPad team has been boasting about beautiful, high-resolution graphics on the iPad available in portrait and landscape orientations, but this comes at a high cost to the user, who are burdened with apps that are hundreds of Megabytes in size and incompatible with the device’s native copy/paste and other sharing functions.

So where does that leave art directors and publishers in the digital space? Vinh suggests that user experience and interaction design are the logical successors to art direction, and that we look back to its roots to figure out what art direction brought to the table in the first place: helping content creators tell their stories. There’s no use fighting aggregation services and social media; They’ll both continue to evolve and become more sophisticated.

Vinh cited Flipboard (and by extension, our own forthcoming app, TweetMag) as an app that’s at the forefront of digital publishing templatization. Most aggregators don’t go much further than presenting content as the traditional River of News that we’ve been accustomed to. These next generation of apps will likely allow for some pretty sophisticated features like intelligent article layouts, facial recognition for image placement, type and orientation sensitivity. Not only will these automated features provide a great reading experience to the user, but they’ll also reduce costs to publishers who are willing to focus on their content.

While the role of art direction in digital publishing still remain uncertain, one thing is clear: publishers’ loss of design control is a golden opportunity for interactive designers, developers and device manufacturers.

Update: Some good discussion in the comments – I don’t think art direction and interaction design are mutually exclusive in every instance, but in the digital publishing space (the subject of this post), that seems to be where things are headed.

Consider the chart above, with a tweet at the low-end of the scale and a highly art directed digital spread on the right end. A tweet requires less time to create and is of a lower fidelity than the spread, but I’d also suggest it requires more thinking in terms of interaction design than art direction. The line is certainly a little fuzzy where interaction design or art direction are the focus of the application, but at the pace of production in the digital publishing space, it’s hard to argue that sophisticated art direction is very sustainable.

Oliver Reichenstein over at iA kicked things off with a simple but provocative question: can user experience really be designed? His article got many, including the folks at Adaptive Path over on their blog, thinking and talking.

To outside spectators, this might seem like a strange thing to get worked up about. But the notion of experience design has been a central and highly operational term in our industry: people like us use it to capture and convey what it is we actually do. Nevertheless, at the end of the day it’s just an idea, a conceptual construct—and a relatively fluid and imprecise one at that.

This is probably why both iA and AP set out to define exactly what they mean by the term experience design. I found their discussion to be really stimulating—though a little hard to track with at times—so I’ve taken the liberty of distilling their comments down into something that hopefully makes it a little easier to compare and contrast:

iA says: experience design means more rigour. It has to do with how you design. It’s design practice made accountable to research, user feedback and measurable business results. It is practiced by seasoned professionals who are passionate about what they do and have earned their stripes through hard-fought experience.

AP says: experience design means more complexity. It has to do with what you design. It’s design practice that focuses on a broader, more multidimensional design space. It is practiced by multi-disciplinary teams who have been trained to apply design thinking systematically and holistically, across a variety of channels and modes.

I think many would agree with both of these lines of thought; that said, AP’s version of experience design is probably closer to where we’d land.

The second challenge that surfaces in this debate has less to do with semantics and more to do with pragmatics. It goes like this: practically speaking, isn’t “experience design” an unrealistic—perhaps even pretentious goal? After all, how I experience something is highly personalized and contextualized, and fundamentally non-deterministic.

I would argue that both iA and AP acquiesced a little too much here. Yes, user experiences are personal; but they’re not arbitrary. Yes, numerous contextual factors come into play; but these aren’t inscrutable. User experience design isn’t about being omniscient: it’s about being conscientious. This is essentially the position that both iA and AP take—but they almost frame it up as a concession. In fact, it’s actually quite a bold claim when you think about it.

The debate between technological determinism and social constructionism is sort of an old one, and has been largely resolved in Gibson’s model of affordances, popularized in the HCI world by Don Norman. (Norman’s also the guy who coined the term experience design, by the way. Check out this interview with AP’s Peter Merholz for more on his perspective.) Nowadays, we recognize that we can design affordances for more than mere usability: we can impact how we perceive something, what we remember about it, how we feel about it. In other words, we can truly craft affordances for experiences.

Recently, there’s been a lot of buzz in and around topics like persuasive design, behavioural economics and choice architecture. Books like Nudge and Drive, and people like Frog Design’s Robert Fabricant who stresses that behaviour is our medium are raising our collective consciousness about the potential for impact that accompanies the design of everything from communications to policy to products and services.

In the midst of all of this, we think it’d be a shame to give up on the idea of experience design. But building equity into this term will require more than a nuanced semantic approach. It will require us getting out there and building actual case studies (as AP and iA both have). If there’s one thing we can’t have too much of as an industry, it is experience design success stories. Projects where we’ve created and transformed more than just the interface, but also the nature of a products and services themselves, their underlying operations and systems, the business problems and outcomes, and yes, the experiences people have along the way.

Now that we’ve had a few weeks to put the iPad through its paces, it’s moved from being a novel new gadget to something that I use every day. The number one question I get when people find out I have an iPad is – what do you actually use it for?

It’s difficult to describe to people why I’d choose an iPad over my MacBook Pro while around the house. The MacBook is easier to type on, it’s more powerful, and it comes with all the latest plug-ins/extensions to make for a pretty good experience, but it also weighs almost 10 pounds and the battery now lasts a measly couple hours on a good day.

After a few days, I found myself bringing the iPad all over the house. It’s so trivial just to pick it up and throw it on the couch, have it in front of you while you’re eating a meal, or watching a TV show or movie in bed.

So what am I actually using it for?

Reading

It’s been a few months since I started using Marco Arment’s Instapaper for iPhone. Since then, I’ve moved all my medium to long-form reading from my desktop to a mobile device. Simply put, reading while sitting at your desk sucks. I can never get comfortable, and it doesn’t lend itself well enough to a comfortable reading position.

Instapaper works by providing you with a simple ‘Read Later’ link you place in your browser’s bookmark bar. Whenever you come across something you’d rather not read, or a site so riddled with ads the content is hard to process, just click the link and off it goes to Instapaper. The next time you launch the app on your phone, you’re greeted with a highly readable, stripped back version of the articles you’ve saved.

It’s a glorious reading experience, not having to be distracted by navigation, advertisements, or other distractions, and the iPad makes it even better. The latest version received a spectacular visual refresh and now includes three of the new system fonts that are included on the iPhone: Hoefler, Baskerville and Palatino. I don’t have to say much more to those of you who are typography nerds, but to the rest of you: it looks damn good and I don’t think I’ll read any blog posts on my Mac again.

Gaming

Gaming on the iPad is still an evolving landscape. While Apple likes to heavily feature the driving games where you have to tilt the device to steer, what you’ll quickly realize is that this is a lousy way to control a game, and you’ll probably just end up with sore arms. Too many iPhone OS games seem to needlessly employ the accelerometer hoping that it will elevate the level of immersion a gamer experiences while playing, but more often than not it just acts as a frustrating barrier to being able to properly play the game.

The types of games that shine on the iPad are generally pretty casual, making use of clever gestural input with little-to-no instructions required. So far, the best of the bunch seem to be those that take advantage of the larger screen on the iPad to give the player a larger area to interact with, like Scrabble or Pinball.

Godfinger is one such game that really shines on the iPad. The mechanics of the game are nearly identical to Farmville, the Facebook-based farming game with a massive user-base. In Godfinger, you’re the All Powerful One, and you’re given a world to preside over with several followers. You can build up cash by having your followers farm for gold, but need to maintain their levels of happiness in doing so.

The graphics are beautiful, and it takes advantage of a few very simple gestures to interact with the world. The game will continue to run even after you’ve quit, and will send you push notifications if anything needs your attention. You can add other friends that are playing in-game and visit each others’ worlds to help out. You can also run it on the iPhone, playing with the same world you created on your iPad.

If it wasn’t already clear, I’ll warn you outright: this game is addictive. I’ve got countless friends and a some folks at T+L hooked on it, but it’s a great example of a simple game done right on this device.

Utilities

The iPad’s screen size gives designers the opportunity to develop some pretty information-dense applications. At over four times the pixel count as an iPhone, there’s a temptation to cram a lot more on the screen at a given time. However, just like the Web, the best experiences on the iPad seem to be from the apps that show restraint and care in their information design.

I get a lot of flack around the office for my purchase of the $0.99 Weather HD, the highly (and perhaps overly) visualized weather app, but it has become one of my most frequently used apps. Why? I could easily one of the many weather apps that provide the time for sunset, sundown, the atmospheric pressure, precipitation pattern and weather radar, but who really needs any of those things?

When I’m walking out the door in the morning, all I really care about is the day’s forecast, the temperature and maybe how windy it is. The designers of this app recognized that, and deliver this information in a beautiful, visually compelling way. It’s not for everyone, but I’d sooner buy an app that does something simple really well than one that tries to do everything and ends up delivering a mediocre experience.

What’s Next?

There’s still a lot of gaps in the iPad experience and a lack of high-quality, functional apps, but developers are surely working away as we speak on many of them. Most notably, Facebook is way late to the game in delivering an iPad-friendly application (usually being first to the plate on new devices). It’s going to be an exciting year for the iPad owners as many of these apps come to fruition, and just like the iPhone’s app ecosystem, it’s surely going to take some time to flourish.