90WPM

What We Can Learn from The Daily

Nieman Lab published a report recently that painted a grim picture of The Daily, analyzing sharing data from Twitter that pointed to a downward trend in app usage. Living in New York, I have yet to see anyone with an iPad reading The Daily since it launched over two months ago. The general consensus is that News Corp did not knock one out of the park.

Many people have pointed out the flaws in iPad magazine apps, most recently Khoi Vinh and Neven Mrgn. What, then, can we learn from the missteps of the first real contender?

Make your content easy to access on any device

The Daily is an iPad news magazine. Ok. I get it. That doesn’t mean that their content needs to be locked up on a single device. As it stands, one cannot copy or email text from an article (which makes quoting articles maddeningly inconvenient), and “sharing” an article sends a link to a static image of the page on the Daily’s web site.

A static image. Think about that. This reeks of 1999-era web design.

I imagine that this is to keep from giving away their content for free (not to mention to keep content farms from republishing the stories) but it does feel a bit like The Daily is cutting off its nose to spite the face.

Linking to a static image is not only annoying to non-subscribers, it also excludes vision-impaired users, with no support for screen readers and no way to resize the text.

Different people prefer reading in different ways. Don’t restrict them to a single format. Above all, don’t make your app the only access point, and make it easy to get content out. And once they get it out, make sure it’s presented equally well to everyone on an iPad, iPhone, Blackberry, web browser, and [insert new tablet here].

Don’t be stingy with your audience. You’re cultivating relationships, not selling used cars. Love your pirates.

Make it quick to download

Don’t waste your users’ time. You don’t have to download an entire 100-megabyte issue at once. You’re wasting money on bandwidth, and wasting your users’ money if they download your app over 3G. Even worse, you’re wasting their time.

If the user leaves your app while a download is in progress, resume the download when they return. It is an insult to your users to force them to stare at a poorly compressed preview of your magazine’s cover while you pull all of your assets down from the server at once. It is also unnecessary, and really just a matter of how your application and the backend it depends on are designed. Downloading the text first, then loading multimedia on demand is not a real challenge unless the content management system driving the magazine doesn’t separate the presentation from the output format (Adobe, I’m looking at you).

Make the price accessible, and the ads bearable.

The Daily got half of this right.

The Daily’s ads are horrible. Until you learn to instinctively swipe past the loading icons, you end up mistaking them for content and sitting there waiting for them to load, only to swipe past them in disgust as you realize you just waited for an ad.

Make the content easy to find and navigate

Favorites, history, and a decent table of contents with links to the articles are a good start.

Search is the number one way people find things on the web, and yet how many iPad magazines offer full-text search across even a single issue? How about offering search across all issues, even the ones which haven’t been downloaded? Might that not sell more magazines?

A little bit of customization goes a long way. Even something as simple as letting the user change the order of the sections should be a laughably easy thing to implement (and if it isn’t, someone should seriously examine how the system is designed). Just because a physical magazine has a determined reading order doesn’t mean your iPad magazine needs to as well.

Use the constraints of the tablet to your advantage.

Like a well-designed book, an app should be a crystal goblet.

You don’t need everything onscreen at once. Let the content breathe, use the whole screen when the user is reading, and remember, you have a touch screen and a bunch of gestures that are already ingrained in users from using Apple’s own apps. Tapping to show and hide navigation, pinching to zoom, these are all things that people get used to doing after a few weeks (or days) with an iPhone.

Don’t push the device past its limits. If navigating the app isn’t a smooth experience, it will distract from the act of reading.

Make something simple and make it awesome

Apple did this with the iPad. It’s easier to make something simple and great then to make something complex and mediocre.

Much of The Daily’s reported $30M development cost was spent working on a content management system that was flexible enough to do all of the things they could think of and which was redesigned thrice as those needs were revised.

Yet their app, the only channel through which their content is delivered, amounts to little more than a shell for static page layouts with embedded video and basic social media integration, and by most accounts is fairly underwhelming given the resources put into it. No amount of investment in content management will make up for a poor user experience and a mediocre product.

♠