Big touchscreens demand big gestures. The iPad in particular begs for swipes and multitouch combos that let you slap at the whole screen to control apps instead of tapping delicately at tiny buttons.

iPad apps like Facebook and Twitter, for example, demonstrate that it's much easier to move through your history by nudging the canvas back and forth than it is to hit Safari's tiny Back button. Small touchscreen buttons require extra thought and motor control—brain and strain—compared to coarse gestures that let you fling screens aside.

With iOS 5, the iPad finally gets exactly those kinds of coarse gestures to move between apps. Yay, right? Swipe left or right with four or five fingers to switch among recent apps, or pinch with four or five fingers to close an app and zip out to the home screen. No need to find the iPad's elusive Home button; you can just paw at the whole screen to navigate apps.

I'm a huge fan of the spirit of these gestures, but I'm not crazy about the excution. I wish Apple had followed the interaction already adopted by other platforms, including BlackBerry Playbook, Nokia N9, and the next version of Microsoft Windows. All of these platforms use edge gestures, a technique that is at once more internally consistent and more deferential to individual apps.

Andy Brockie from the Guardian's digital design team shares the key stages behind the design development of our new Guardian iPad app