One of the many criticisms logged against the brand new, and super-hyped, iPad is it’s inability to do “multitasking” – users can’t run more than one application at a time. Well, technically they can – except only when running Apple-created applications such as the iPod music player. Because it can’t multitask, it’s not as “good” as a lower-priced net book.
I daresay that the lack of multitasking is a strength, not a weakness. I think it is as much a design decision as the industrial design of the hardware is.
What I have found in my user research is that users are doers, not browsers – they are very task driven and in many ways, impatient and easily “distractible”. The current design of computer operating systems are intended to allow users to do multiple things at once, and they can have hundreds of windows open if they wanted to…
Except a result of this is an interface that has to provide some form of window management function, and windows don’t automatically “go away” when users are done with them – so the computer desktop often becomes very cluttered and very confusing. Instead of being useful, the interface reduces the focus and efficiency of the users trying to get things done. There’s too much there, there.
The iphone and iPad is different than a computer operating system, it is task-driven… Users can’t do more than one thing at once because that’s not how people work. We focus on doing and then once done we do something else. I have been doing quite a bit of design and documentation with the iPad this past week for a project, using programs like Omnigraffle, Pages, and iMockups to do what I would normally do with my laptop… And it’s allowed me to be amazingly productive (though I would really like the ability to print – hint hint).
Samuel Johnson famously said that “nothing focuses the mind like a hanging.” I’d like to extend that idea to modal user interfaces.
Apple recently announced that the new iPhone (and eventually iPad) operating system will let users multitask… But not really. What Apple is doing is hiding apps, freezing them in memory until the user returns to them (unless it is an app that can truly run in the background, such as a music player such as Pandora). This helps preserve battery life and processing power and keeps the experience simple as well.
This new OS is just helping users by not having to relaunch apps – they still can only do one thing at a time. It’s still modal. Which is fine – as detailed above, it’s how we do things anyway.
Apple is doing some truly interesting things in the iPhone and iPad UI… And I think that we may see aspects of the experience design in those devices turning up in the full blown desktop OS sooner than we may think.