When it comes to the WSJ app’s full-screeners, “we don’t really think of them as interstitials,” Bernard says. The iPad’s UI so changes the calculus of the ad experience that the conventional wisdom about such ads — essentially, to paraphrase legions of web users, that interstitials suck — doesn’t apply as readily to iPad ads. “If you’re online and you’ve got a full-page thing between every article, it might start to feel overwhelming — because you’re online,” Bernard points out. On the iPad, though, it’s different: The swipe has more in common with a print-based page-turn than an online click; what rankles online may fade, and fairly seamlessly so, into the user experience on a touch-based platform.
(In contrast, the New York Times app’s interstitials require you to find and tap a tiny “skip this ad” button to get past the ad without waiting. It’s a small difference from the Journal’s swipe-the-ad-away model, but it feels a lot more like an intrusion.)
In other words: the Journal’s ad-in-app strategy takes a cue from print, mimicking the check-it-out-or-flip-past-it optionality of the newspaper — and, in particular, the magazine — consumer experience. “The best of print doesn’t just mean the editorial judgment of how you lay out all the stories and show their importance,” Bernard told me; “it’s also the ability to have this full-page advertising.”
In reality, there is not much – actually not anything – you can do on the iPad that you can’t already do elsewhere in terms of what and how content is presented. All the fancy animations, graphics and spaces are familiar to anyone long into Flash, Javascript, Acrobat, AIR and AJAX.
The thing that is really new is the iPad interface for interacting with the content. It is indeed the iPhone interface writ large. And considering the impact the iPhone interface has had over the past two years on pretty much every other smartphone, it is amazing to realize that no one beat Apple to applying those lessons to a larger computer screen.
If the iPhone model follows, however, we’ll have swipe interfaces all over the place on computers within the next 12 months. The mouse might have just reached its zenith as the predominant interface application, with the finger now on the rise, and with centuries of page-turning, finger-swiping human reading experience about to reassert itself.