As smart phones keep getting smarter, more and more of us are leaving our laptops behind, leaning instead on our trusty phones to keep up when we're away from home or office. Unlike laptops, notebooks, or messy collections of Post-It notes, our iPhones rarely leave our sides, making them handy vessels for bottling brainstorms, managing to-dos and itineraries, or capturing on-the-go information like expenses or billable hours.
Slowly but surely, we're learning to get stuff done on the small screen, but it's important to keep this miniature revolution in perspective: the iPhone can't match a laptop in many respects, and you shouldn't assume people will use it the same way. No matter how blazingly fast your fingers and thumbs might be, for example, delicately pecking away at a touchscreen keyboard won't win any speed records. The iPhone is better tuned for parking quick notes than powering through the Great American Novel. A new style of device encourages a new set of work habits.
The iPhone is a device of convenience and context, ideal for short dashes of activity—microtasks. The best iPhone apps emphasize quick access to ideas, contacts, tasks, info, forecasts, or entertainment. These apps thrive on simplicity, offering fewer features than desktop counterparts, but also making it faster and easier to get it down quick. Compared to traditional computer work of long, sustained work sessions, the best productivity apps are tuned for short but frequent hits, encouraging users to capture new information and ideas as they happen, typically to be processed and massaged later. The iPhone is likewise ideal for reading and even editing documents in the otherwise lost time of grocery-store lines or subway commutes. (This also happens to be true of the best iPhone games, which are typically designed for quick but tasty bites of gameplay, just a few minutes at a time.) There's room for more leisurely exploration, too, as you'll see in "I'm Bored", but in all of the iPhone's contexts, the device's quick-draw convenience lets users make the most of downtime, whether for work, play, or creative contemplation.
Productivity and reference apps in particular should be tuned to make the most of these intrawork interludes, making themselves tapworthy with efficient interfaces that are well-suited to this evolving style of work. As you consider your app's use cases, build the resulting features around microtask sprints of brief activity. Identify the recurring tasks that your users will perform with your app, and then polish, polish, polish. Optimize the design and workflow to make those tasks quick and effortless to accomplish on the go. Tapworthy apps get it done fast.
Figure 2-10. Tapworthy apps accommodate users in a hurry, optimizing for frequent, recurring jobs. The to-do list app Things (left) makes it fast to add new tasks from any screen: Just tap the + icon that's always parked at the bottom left of every screen. The built-in Calendar app takes a similar approach for new events, placing its + icon at the top right of all screens.