As a mobile app designer coming from the world of print, I completely understand the urge to incorporate all that I know from that oh-so-familiar world of the physical product and throw it into this shiny object that I can carry around in my pocket.
One problem always came up when I would try that. I noticed that my new sandbox was 320×480 (in most cases).
That doesn’t keep people from trying though. So today, I am going to illustrate how to not to attempt this approach. Come back tomorrow for part two of this post as I will illustrate how another publication manages to pull off this dangerous approach with fantastic results.
First, lets meet the Metro Herald.
This is a daily free sheet that targets 18-44 year-olds in Dublin. I’m quite familiar with the paper through their e-edition which I have always felt was well done (as well as you can do pdf print in the standard web brower). I can’t see a reader in Dublin wanting to see the printed page on the internet instead of a more traditional news site, but seeing the PDFs speak to my print background.
The Metro Herald has had an iPhone app out for a while according to the iTunes store, but I hadn’t seen it advertised prior to today. This isn’t all that uncommon for apps as many publishers want to get the products pushed into iTunes so they can tinker with it a bit before promoting it. The fact that I saw it prominently promoted told me that this was the real deal and that they wanted eyeballs on it.
Unfortunately, I landed my eyeballs on the app this morning and I’m asking myself the question everyone should ask before they build an app.
1) Why do we need an app?
This is a fantastic question for the folks at the Metro Herald to ponder further. They are a free paper that distributes in a dense urban area. They have no web presence beyond their e-edition and this app. Why go make the app before you have a proper website? It’s a puzzling strategic choice.
2) What will this do that our current sites doesn’t?
See above. There is no website. I understand why they don’t as the publication has a complicated family tree that involves three parent companies and a recent merger. Whenever you have that sheer amount of upheaval around a paper, things like digital strategy are bound to get lost in the mix.
So out of all this, what do we get? A page-for-page copy of the publication’s e-edition. I won’t get into the other areas, like Search, because there is so much to discuss with the ‘app e-edition.’
Many of you might be asking yourself, ‘What’s wrong with throwing the PDFs into an app?’
Well, let’s start with its a nightmare to navigate. For some reason, Steve Jobs’ favorite double tap function has been disabled, leaving you endessly pinching at the screen as you try to manually align the columns of text to a size that you can read.
But the little things like usability could be tweaked and forgiven, if the page PDFs served any function beyond being the sole source of information from the app. But the app is just as flat as the PDFs that you are expected to zoom in and out of for your information.
There is nothing to fix with this approach, because its just wrong.
So again, why do they need the app?
Because they have no website to point to and their e-edition is driven by flash. That translates into game over on the iPhone. So they translate the e-edition into iPhone form to cover the gap, when the bigger question has to be—why aren’t you leveraging things in your ecosystem that are free to help bridge the gap in the digital dollars available?
There is a lot that can be done on the cheap in this era and I just hate to see people get paid to make bad apps which is exactly what this is.
For a similar experience, go check out the NBC.com app for the ‘Heroes’ comic book reader. Tons of stories and artwork, trapped in a maze of Zoom & Doom.
