On iPad Application Design: "Look like a viewer, and behave like an editor."

I was talking to people at the bar after UX Show And Tell about how I have no formal education and that any knowledge of design I have consists of what I read all day for fun. So my idea of what constitutes good user experience comes from the sense of gestalt I accumulate from the sum of my extracurricular reading materials, rather than any direct teaching. Reading this article didn’t give me any incredibly new insight, but the quote in the title summarizes an idea I’ve been grappling with for close to a month but have never quite been able to articulate up until now.

Personally, at least, the goal of having a minimal UI that gets more complex as you invoke relevant actions is easy for me to endorse when I’m speaking about a product in a broad and conceptual way, but if I’m actually tasked with practically implementing that UI it becomes considerably more difficult.