The magazine. you pick it up, you slide your thumb inside the pages, the weight of the pages resting on your thumb immediately tells you that the page you’re about to flick to is 3/4 of the way through the magazine.
You haven’t even looked at a page layout or contents list yet. You throw the pages open and instantly the book rest heavily in your left hand while your right hand gently supports the last few pages. A quick strum of the thumb flicks page after page as your eyes take in a glimpse of each layout that flies by.
The ergonomics of magazine reading
I’m aware that this is starting to read like an excerpt from a ‘Romantic’ novel and I’m pretty sure if I were to go into detail about the physical interaction with the iPad it would probably get even a bit more steamier. (The full hand strokes and the quick 180º swivels etc). But if we ignore this for the moment there are a few stages of the interaction with the magazine that for the time being at least will not be replicated by the magazine iPad Apps. (At least a few that I believe would be valuable to the user interaction).
The magazine Apps I have had the chance to see so far all seem to work in a similar way when browsing the contents. A pop up ‘contents page’ will appear, presenting a thumbnail of each page layout. One thing that came to mind when seeing this was the way I navigate my way through magazines that I read on a weekly or monthly basis. Just by the unbalanced weight of the pages in my hands I have a pretty clear idea ‘where I am’ within the structure of the content.
Making use of the senses
What if the iPad could shift its weight? Could vibrations replicate this intuitive knowledge? Could the iPad replicate the action of throwing open a magazine to a (slightly) random page?
I understand this could easily be replicated visually. The metaphor of a stack of pages on each side of the spread would do this well enough. But this is my point. The interaction with magazines isn’t always visual. As much as the iPad is inviting more senses to our interaction with content, it does seems a shame that the more intuitive and automatic actions involved in everyday reading will slowly be lost.