Tablets and users
Did convenience ever lose?Af Online Communicator Lara Mulady, Designit
Users are demonstrating new patterns of behavior when they interact with tablets. It’s a whole new world out there, which is why we’ve narrowed the changes down to four essential different trends.
A new pattern of customer and user needs is emerging because of tablets. We’re still in the early stages of this development but the picture, which now shows itself, is one we haven’t seen before. Until now, every new medium and every new means of communication, has led to new user behavior and, at this early stage, tablets seem to be the catalyst for yet more changes. Somewhere we’ve seen the tablet compared with the microwave oven. Like the microwave oven, everything you can do with the tablet you could also do before you bought it. But now, you just do it differently – faster, smarter, better, all at your convenience. And did convenience ever lose? One of the fascinating aspects of all this is how tablets differ from the use of Smartphones. This is highly relevant when navigating in the rapidly growing world of apps. Clients are eager to find the right answers in this realm. Should we invest in developing Smartphone apps, tablet apps or both? What are the differences in how users relate to Smartphones and tablets? These are just few of many, many questions surfacing as companies realize that tablets are something they must also master. We must remind ourselves however, that even though the market for tablets is growing rapidly it is still in its infancy. Basically we aren’t certain about how and where it’s all moving. Every means of communication is special The first thing to understand is that almost everything you’ve learned about Smartphones is irrelevant or completely different when it comes to tablets. You can’t transfer all your new insights 1:1 from Smartphones to tablets and expect to get away with it. Whenever a new technology emerges we see some cases of shovelware. The term comes from newspapers moving on-line and bringing old formats and content with them, basically shoveling what they used to do on print directly onto digital platform. It took quite some time for newspapers to get it right. Now we are witnessing something similar in the sense that people try to transfer what they do on the PC or Smartphone onto the tablet. It just won’t work. Every means of communication is special and should be treated accordingly. That’s one thing we do know, and there is more. We’ve looked at four significant trends intending to map this somewhat uncharted tablet territory. Together they constitute a list of essential questions to ask yourself once you decide to move into this endlessly fascinating new realm of business. 1. It’s not a Smartphone One of the fascinating things about Smartphones, which companies are only beginning to understand the consequences of, is that you are with your customer all the time. When you’re “in the pocket of someone” they own you in the sense that they can turn you on and off at their convenience unlike television or newspapers. The balance of power is different. On the phone you can offer yourself to the users but if what you offer isn’t very good and very relevant, they will decline your offer. You’re there on the plane, on holiday, on the bus, in bed, in the bathroom, everywhere and at all times. So you better have something good to offer. As tablets begin to emerge, people tend to think that that this new technology is similar to Smartphones, but they’re not. The tablet is a mobile technology but not equivalent to a Smartphone. People do carry it around and use it as a mobile technology, but only in very select situations, and not on-the-go like the Smartphone. Thus it lacks the 'anytime-anywhere' paradigm of the Smartphone. This has serious consequences for how apps for tablets must be significantly different. 2. It’s a shared experience Tablets are the first devices that truly bring shared and connected experiences to our digital age. Everything perceived on tablets facilitate and support sharing, both in terms of what we see on the screen and how we interact with digital representations on a multi-touch screen. By nature it’s a social technology; often families have one tablet at home, shared by the members of the house. Tablets is a physically distributed media and they are great when two people co-work on a task or co-experiencing media such as video, pictures, games etc. As technology advance the physical properties of the tablets will change accordingly.
3. Natural User Interfaces (NUI) is the new black 'Once you go NUI, you never go back' is a common way of phrasing that NUI is the future of human-computer interaction. As opposed to the traditional Graphic User Interface (GUI) know from our desktop applications, Natural User Interface (NUI) is true, direct manipulation where you interact physically with the app through natural gestures such as touch, pinch, rotate and swipe via single or multi-touch gestures. An interaction that resembles the way we interact with physical objects in our surroundings. Thus, the NUI learning curve is more or less transparent and the gap between interface and user perceptions is to some extent eliminated. Today children find that a computer is old fashioned because you can’t interact with the screen in any natural way. Once gesture recognition becomes more commonplace in technology it will be yet a further advance from GUI to NUI. But NUI and multi-touch is for an entirely different type of use than GUIs. Tablet is the electronic medium, which bears the greatest resemblance to books and newspapers. Tablets are lean back whereas computers and Smartphones are lean forward. They come with a whole new set of opportunities for companies but none of these will turn into sustainable business models unless user needs are prominently featured in the business equation.
4. Tablets are for the richer experience The tablet doesn’t focus on the concepts of 'anytime' and 'anywhere' in the same degree as the Smartphone. Instead it has a main focus on the 'inbetweenness' and interaction in the area of tension between context, technology and users. Generally speaking, people spend more time on their tablets, have more patience when interacting, and seek more elaborate information via the device. This is a direct consequence of complexity of the tasks executed when using the tablets. The combination of NUI, shared interactions and increased information space stimulates the user to conduct complex and long term tasks such as financial management, travel booking, reading, writing and annotating entire articles. But still, the very same offerings stimulate mobile usage as well as social and shared interactions. Just think about when you’re travelling to a new city and suddenly want advice on restaurants or the like. Apps like Yelp give you an awesome overview right at your fingertips. Or even when you desperately need to find that British Museum in London. Just pull out the tablet and it will immediately turn into your shared interactive city map with bookmarks, annotations, images and video – no need for the curly old paper map. So, where Smartphones are simpler in their mobile tasks, such as finding the way from A to B, the tablet gives the user a far richer and more detailed information space with shared experiences.
As technology gets better, we will most likely see a correspondence between the decrease in weight and the increase in screen size and resolution, thus significantly enhancing the opportunities of tablets as shared media. 
