April 28, 2011

Al Gore's Our Choice

I think many people would agree that most of the magazines currently available on the iPad are not great. How lacking they really are becomes particularly obvious when those existing magazines are compared to Al Gore's new book Our Choice,1 created by push pop press.

Watch Mike Matas show some of its interaction design:

When I read magazines that are based on Adobe's publishing solution,2 I constantly feel lost. How far in am I? Can I scroll down, or not? If I go right, what will I see? How do I see what's in the magazine?

None of these problems occur with Our Choice. I always know where I am, what's behind me, what's ahead of me, or how to switch to the next or previous chapter.

Our Choice is a huge step ahead in how content should be organized in this medium, and something every other publisher should take a long, hard look at.

Further Reading

Johan Ronsse has written a piece about the UX design of Our Choice.

  1. I originally mistakenly called the book "Our World," which might be because you see a huge spinning globe when you first start it. Sorry, Al! ↩︎

  2. Wired, for example. ↩︎

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designed for use cover

But wait, there's more!

Want to read more like this? Buy my book's second edition! Designed for Use: Create Usable Interfaces for Applications and the Web is now available DRM-free directly from The Pragmatic Programmers. Or you can get it on Amazon, where it's also available in Chinese and Japanese.