Design, Design, Design.

Folks in the real-estate business have a mantra, "Location, Location, Location."  The iPad application development industry should have a similar mantra, "Design, Design, Design."  Design is everything in the development of iPad applications.

Creating well designed iPad applications is not simple. It's not something you are going to get from an OmniGraph template or by using the generic look and feel of controls in Cocoa Touch.  In my experience, iPad applications have three design aspects which are equally important: Aesthetics,  Interaction, and User Experience.

Aesthetics Design
When I talk about aesthetics I'm talking about the visual elements of the design. The colors, the shapes, the fonts, the overall theme.  With all do respect to the Cocoa engineers, you can't get great aesthetics using the generic look and feel of controls that come pre-packaged with the iOS SDK.  You have to combine the well engineered Cocoa Touch controls with custom art work and sometimes you have to design your own controls from scratch.  And its not just the controls that need attention, its also the transitional animations, the sounds, and use of screen-space.

Interaction Design
Interaction design, what people also call UI design,  is the second part of the design equation - to some its the only part that matters but I don't agree with that.  Your application can look visually stunning, but if its difficult to execute a task or to discover how to do different tasks, than forget it.  The beauty is only skin deep.  There are entire books written on this subject alone.

User Experience Design
Finally there is User Experience.  While the term "user experience" is becoming pretty overloaded let me set the stage for how I see its role in relation to aesthetics and interaction design.  In terms of design, user experience is everything that's not directly addressed by aesthetic and interaction. So, for example, the precision with which the application is targeted at an appropriate market is part of the user experience design.  The ease with which the iPad application can be downloaded, its price, and support for the application are also a part of user experience.

In subsequent blog posts I hope to hang a little meat on these design hooks by showing how well known application approached them and where they might have been improved.