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Really nice app, good job! Let’s see how we can make it even better. Here are few features that can potentially be improved.

Collapsible Rack

The meaning of the arrow icon that collapses a shelf is not clear.

I am sure you added a collapsible shelves feature for a reason. Let’s explore some alternatives that can potentially help us get rid of the collapsing icon (and, consequently, collapsing function) altogether, therefore making it more clear. (The clearest thing is the one you just see through.)

Let’s imagine a user of your app. Say his name is Andy. He is a graphic designer, and he is very excited about your app. He added a bunch of stuff to his rack: his son’s doodles, photos of his family, his portfolio samples, presentations he likes, documents he wants to read, whatever. The important thing is: Andy has a lot of stuff on his rack.

Say, then, there’s a potential client and Andy wants to share some portfolio samples with him. Andy probably won’t want to show his toddler’s doodles in this case. (The client might take it the wrong way.)

Here’s where this collapsing feature can come handy: Andy would just collapse the shelves he doesn’t want to show before presenting, and he’s good. Is he?

In this scenario, allowing people to “hide” some of the shelves seems a very logical decision. If you consider the usage scenario more closely, though, you will notice that the main task of the user is not usually to hide something, but to show something. (Portfolio samples in this case.)

There’s a more efficient way to empower him to do so. If Andy wants to show something to his potential client, it would be more efficient for him to designate what he wants to show, rather than exclude everything he doesn’t.

How does this apply to your app design?

You don’t usually carry your child’s doodles to a meeting where you are presenting revenue projections and ROI figures. (Well, sometimes you do, but you get the idea.)  I think you can get rid of the collapsing shelves feature altogether and introduce multiple racks instead. We all play multiple roles in our lives, and there will be one rack (or more) for our “work” selves, one for “home,” one for friends, one for mom, etc. Since the iPad rack is better than a real-world rack, you can also add an “everything” rack, where all stuff will sit.

Resolution: The best UI is not the one that allows the user to perform an action efficiently. It’s the one that allows him to achieve the goal with minimal effort. (While having some fun, hopefully.)

Existing App:
Sometimes you don’t want to show
everything that is on your rack.

Existing App:
Collapsing shelves seems like a nice feature, but it’s hard to use—you need to collapse them all (multiple taps), and then re-expand/re-collapse when you are getting your rack ready for someone else to view.

Proposed Solution:
Allow users to create multiple racks for different presentation occasions.
Keep an “Everything” rack to give the user immediate access to all his stuff.

And here’s how you can help your users view and organize all their racks.

Pinch-and-Hold Gesture

Pinch to zoom out is not working properly: at first we thought that you can’t pinch to go back to the rack, because you need to pinch and hold, I guess.

I agree: going from a full-screen document back to the rack with the pinch-and-hold gesture is actually very easy once you learn it. The biggest problem is how would your users learn that the gesture is there?

Virtually every iPad user knows how to pinch to zoom in and out, because it’s a very natural gesture, and it is used consistently in every native app where it applies. You can zoom Google maps, photos, mail attachments, web pages. So it is a very familiar and, therefore, intuitive gesture. Modifying this gesture even slightly—just requiring the user to hold for a second after he pinches—renders this gesture almost useless. It’s not familiar anymore and, consequently, not intuitive; users are trying to pinch to zoom out, and it doesn’t work. In our testing all users got frustrated about this, and no one figured out that you should pinch and hold for a little bit to make the document go back to the rack.

If you want to deal with this problem, your first instinct will probably be to add some help, or explanations, of how one should properly pinch. Keep in mind, though, that best UI is invisible; therefore, any help—any additional explanation of how the UI works—means the UI is not perfect. Instead of creating a help page or tutorial, try to eliminate this situation altogether, so the user won’t have to deal with it.

Resolution: Use a pinch gesture to go back to the rack from the full-screen document instead of pinching and holding. If you are worried about people accidentally zooming out and going back to the rack when they just want to zoom out the document they were viewing, consider the native iPad photo gallery app. If you are viewing a photo, you can pinch to zoom the photo out, and if you pinch a little more, you will go back to your collection of events. Apple did a really nice job determining thresholds that will feel natural to users. Take a look. I am sure you will get new ideas.

Another way to deal with this problem is to not rely on pinching to go back to the rack and instead using a “Rack” button, like is done in iBooks.

Favorites

Highlighting favorites might be confusing because the user will still see everything else. If you have a lot of content in the app, it can be hard to hunt for the favorited items, even if they are highlighted.

I think that if you created multiple racks (see above), you won’t actually need the concept of favorites. Multiple racks would eliminate this problem altogether.

File Types

You can consider adding file-type icons next to the documents and also indicating whether the document is one-page or multi-page. That would help the users find the documents they are looking for faster.

Hope to see stacked previews in a future version!

Search

Have you considered adding a text-search function, so the users can search files by name?

Great, can’t wait to see it!

Viewable Area

In full-screen viewing mode you, might want to make the top bar semi-transparent to increase the visible document area.

I see that you are hiding the top bar upon a user’s tap, which is good:

You can also do two other things that will increase the viewable area of the document even further:

Make the top bar semi-transparent.

Make the status bar (with clock, signal strength, etc.) semi-transparent as well.
Correction: Oddly enough, you cannot have a translucent status bar in iPad apps, despite the fact that Apple clearly uses it on the home screen.

Application Icon

Your current application icon certainly looks slick and simple.

The best rule for designing app icons is: what you see is what you get.

I think you can better communicate to a user who has never seen the app before—and judges by the icon to figure out what app is all about—if you put multiple documents on the rack, not just one.

iOS 5 news stand is a great example:

Good luck with your product. Great work.