TAKEAWAY: The good news iPad app welcomes the user in, displays what is in store for the visitor then fulfills the promise, retaining him as long as the visitor wishes to stay.
Put out the welcome mat and close the door behind the guest
It is one of those points of debate when we conduct a workshop to carry out the planning of a new newspaper/magazine app.
There will always be the one editor or two who would like to offer up to the minute updates on news inside the news app. They argue that if one is reading a newspaper app, one wants to be constantly informed of the latest news.
I am willing to listen to these arguments, but I tend to disagree.
I believe that mobile and online editions are platforms for breaking news, while the tablet offers the closest we can come to disconnecting while being connected.
I draw the analogy with guests in our home.
What would happen if, when your dinner guests arrive, you simply tell them that the neighbors across the street may have a better meal to offer, and that the one neighbor three doors down has the ultimate mega dessert.
It is an invitation for the guest to go elsewhere, which is exactly what happens with online editions.
I am sometimes reading a piece, but the first paragraph of the story will tempt me wtih a link to something that may be even better (or so I think at the moment). I link up to that, abandon the original site and end up in two or three other destinations.
While online editions may be sort of progressive dinners, apps are the opposite—-a relaxed, sit down dinner with hosts you like and wish to spend time with.
(For those too young to know what a progressive dinner is, it is a dinner party in which each successive course is prepared and eaten at the residence of a different host. Alternatively, each course may be eaten at a different dining area within a single large establishment. It is essentially a variant on a potluck dinner, with travel involved. This is sometimes known as a round-robin.)
I find that this is the best explanation I can offer to difuse the idea of having a column of constantly updatable headlines right on the landing page.
However, this does not mean that you may not list 10 to 15 headlines of breaking news, but avoid the temptation to offer the link. Do not take your guests away and send them to try what others are offering.
The Branson, Murdoch experiments
A Financial Times article, helps to understand the point I have made above.
This piece refers to iPad apps by Richard Branson and Rupert Murdoch, who are launching iPad-only publications. Sir Richard has unveiled a $2.99 monthly magazine called Project, while Murdoch is about to launch a “newspaper” called The Daily, for which he hopes 800,000 people will pay $1 a week.
The writer, John Gapper, compares the experience of reading a publication with a lot of content on a desktop and a tablet. “A regular browser on a computer is good for skimming (“surfing”) among many different news sources, but poor at immersing you in one.”
He adds that the iPad, with its full-screen apps containing a single game or information source allows for an entire edition can be downloaded at once. “This makes it easier to navigate in depth and to know where you are – an experience akin to print.”
Cozy and intimate
And, if as I keep saying, the iPad is the closest thing to the feeling one gets reading a good book in print, with the added benefits of a digital medium, then a piece in the Personal Tech section of The New York Times, reaffirms the thought.
David Carr writes that :
The historical media verticals of radio, television, print and Web evaporate inside the frame of an iPad — it’s all just content, backlighted and inviting, waiting for the swipe of a finger. Long-form narrative and news has found a reliable wing man in the iPad.
Indeed, online we surf, we scan, we link, we jump and we embark into a succulent progressive dinner, not spending enough time anywhere and doing a lot of travel to get to our destination.
The iPad app IS the destination, it is a three or a seven course meal, with or without dessert, as you wish, all self contained, waiting to be consumed when one wants it and is hungry for it.
If it sounds delightful, it is because it truly is.
Carr even refers to the iPad as bringing back “the romance of reading.”
I may add that——and writers everywhere may rejoice—-it will also bring back a renaissance of the longer narrative.
For those of us designing news apps, this is reason to rejoice also as we remember that, indeed, the iPad is NOT a newspaper nor an online edition. It is the tablet edition inviting you to close the door, leave the world behind momentarily and enter a world where the eye, the brain and the finger can move as slow or as fast as they want.