DPS app design spotlight: U of Dayton Viewbook

(This is the second in an intermittent series of posts highlighting interesting or innovative apps built using Adobe Digital Publishing Suite.)

Kudos to the designers who produced the University of Dayton Undergraduate Viewbook app. This free, vertical-orientation-only iPad app is a "viewbook" for prospective undergraduate students, intended to give them a feel for the campus, programs and values of the University of Dayton. If you are interested in learning what works well in an iPad app I'd encourage you to download this app and explore it. Here are a few things I like:

On the first screen after the video cover screen, you'll see the simple screen below, This doesn't appear in the screen shot, but the sidebar "We believe that life is to be experienced" rotates through several "We believe..." statements every 3 seconds or so. This is a nice, subtle use of the DPS slideshow feature with "Auto Play" specified.

I like the mechanism they designed for revealing facts and tidbits of information, as shown in the bottom of the screen shot below. This is done with InDesign buttons and a multi-state object.

In the side-by-side screen shots below, the Images change in place when the buttons are tapped while the copy remains static. Simple to execute in InDesign/DPS, yet a nice way to present multiple views without adding extra screens.

This is a nice use of vertically scrolling text in the blue sidebar.

Here's a nice example of a graphic illustrating the distance from U of Dayton to various destinations in the U.S. Again, this is just buttons and a multi-state object. Note also the "top" button to take the user back to the top of the article--a nice touch.

This app contains an abundance of other tasteful interactivity. Remember, the point of interactivity in an app like this is to engage the reader and make the app "sticky" so the user spends more time learning about the University. I think that the U of Dayton succeeded in spades with this app.