Thursday I wrote about Push Pop Press and the Our Choice app. I was curious to try it out for myself so today I bought it in the app store. In this post I’ll review the design choices that ultimately make this app worth trying (as a designer), even if you’re not interested in the book at all.
First, a sidenote about the pricing. I bought this app for €3,99. If you were to buy the paperback edition it would have cost you €20,99 (#). An avid book reader with an iPad might save some money in the longer run. Assuming he doesn’t buy a new iPad every two years.
Our Choice opens with an introductory video that explains what the app is about and a few basics on how to use it. Some interactive magazines (I’m looking at you, Wired magazine) leave you guessing where to go next: should I swipe left or down? Where am I?
The way you navigate through Our Choice is always consistent: swipe left to go to the next page, swipe right to go back. If you pinch out you navigate to the chapter overview where you can switch chapters or go to a specific page. Pages contains interactive element which you can “enter” by tapping or pinching inward, and easily exit by pinching outward. Watch the TED talk to see this in action.
Another thing that helps your sense of navigation is that you can always see a little bit of the previous page and the next page on the left and right side. Content ©Al Gore
Almost every page contains an “element of interest”. Sometimes this is just a pullquote, but 80% of the time this is a photo, an interactive infographic or a video. This approach probably helps to keep the reader engaged and actually finish the book.
“Opening” the photos — with a pleasing folding animation — reveals a full-screen version of the crop used on the page itself. Some of the photos pan and zoom using the Ken Burns effect (which you might know from iMovie). Photos can contain either a text caption or an audio caption. When a photo has an audio caption the only element on the page (besides the photo of course) is a play button, which changes into a pie chart when tapped, showing the progress of the audio fragment playing. Since the audio pieces are so short it’s not necessary to offer a slider control. Very elegant.
The photo quality is stellar. Content ©Al Gore
The other kind of narrated content are videos, which usually last longer (1-3 minutes). These videos do contain an elegant progress control at the bottom to go to a specific part of the video. However, this control is so small and unobstrusive it’s easy to miss it.
The audio and video keeps playing if you go to the overview of the chapter. It never stops unless you explicitly pause it, the video finishes, or you go to the next page. In that last case the audio softly fades out instead of stopping abruptly. Nice.
You always open a video at will, it never starts to autoplay. Unlike videos in Wired magazine, that sometimes start to autoplay when you switch pages, leaving you wondering whether you’re watching an ad or not. The approach taken in Our Choice respects the reader. Again, I’m comparing to Wired, since it’s the second best magazine reading experience out there (unless I count Reeder and Flipboard, but that’s a different category for me). I’m not intentionally dissing Wired here. Wired is a lot better than most reading experiences on the iPad. I’m pitting the best against each other, and I think Wired could learn some tricks from Our Choice.
The other kind of interactive element, the infographics, remind me of biology and geography textbooks, or even interactive displays at museums. The main difference here is that the iPad actually has a good and responsive touchscreen so they don’t feel awkward to control.
The video content is heavily compressed, probably to help keep the download size small. The initial download size is 52,8 Mb which is quite hefty compared to Wired’s 2.3 Mb. I don’t know how much space the full book takes: with Our Choice you download the first chapter, the others are downloaded in the background as you progress through the book. When opening the book on a 3G connection it says “Please connect to WiFi to download chapters in this book.” The Wired app is a small wrapper where you use in-app purchases to actually buy and download the 300-400 Mb magazines. It wouldn’t surprise me if Our Choice was of a similar size when fully downloaded.
To help keep the download size small, I suspect an actual font is embedded i.e. the text is rendered in the app instead of showing images. This is possible since iOS 3.2. The Push Pop Press about page is not really clear about this:
Tell rich stories using text, images, audio, video, maps and interactive graphics
To Wired’s credit this was not possible yet when Wired for iPad originally came out.
The typography is pleasing and even contains glyphs for character combinations such as ff and ffi. The body copy is set justified left and there’s plenty of hyphenation going on. Unfortunately not much care seems to be taken in avoiding widows, but now I’m really nitpicking to find something that’s wrong with this app. There are no settings to adjust the text size but the default text size is large enough so that you don’t need to change it anyway. Good defaults win over user preferences.
Besides, if the option to change the text size would exist, it would mess up the reading experience since the imagery is very contextual to the content next to it.
New paragraphs are marked with an classic book style indent rather than the web style bottom margin. Brioni is used for the body text. Apparently Al Gore cares about design enough to commission a change to a typeface.
Our Choice is a wonderful piece of interaction design. Wired magazine did some of the ground work; InstaPaper, Kindle and Reeder explored how regular non-interactive eBooks and text content should be read on the iPad; but this app truly shows what an interactive book should be. I’m looking forward to the next Push Pop Press publication. They are skilled designers for sure.
About the author: Johan Ronsse is a freelance interface designer living in Antwerp, Belgium. View his work, profile or ethos. He tweets as @wolfr_ and is available for exciting projects.
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