According to Pew Research, The State of the News Media 2012, “44% of adults own a smartphone, and the number of tablet owners grew by about 50% since the summer of 2011, to 18% of Americans over age 18.” While the news forums all but crackle with journalists claiming that the newspaper isn’t dead, I’m sure we can agree that the tablet is the best medium, if not the likely future, of news. So it’s certainly time to discuss the design elements of a good tablet news app. In order to do so, we need to first look at what are still today’s most popular devices for news: newspapers and magazines. Yes, these are devices. They are made of paper, but they are still machines for discovering information. And they still define how we think about news. I can’t resist looking at them from an information architecture standpoint. They have: a user interface designed to support search, discovery, navigation, and browsing; a controlled vocabulary (universally recognized labels and signposts); standard organizing principles (or schema, in the world of cognitive psychology). What are these organizing principles? I could write a very long article about this, but basically, in plain terms, newspapers are designed for: Discovery (Any important news today?) Casual browsing (What’s going on in town this weekend?) Known-item search (How is the S&P doing? What was the football score?) Standardized navigation (It’s easy to flip to topics like Sports, Business, Politics, and at a finer granularity, Classifieds.) Newspapers use different sized headline fonts and page placement to indicate relative importance, with more important articles on the front page, section front pages, and odd pages. Overall, a newspaper is easily scanned and navigated. Plus it’s easy to clip articles and coupons. Magazines also score well for browsing, navigation, and search, especially if they cater to a specialty topic (Sports, Brides, Fashion, etc.). Magazines have a table of contents, and often have an advertising index. Print, of course, lacks rich media capabilities, social networking, and hyperlinks. But it’s easy to carry, and works without wifi, which meant that until the smartphone revolution, print still had an advantage over digital, especially in subways...
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- Digital Marketing (8)
- eLearning (2)
- Future of eBooks (10)
- Future of News (11)
- More Visitors: SEO & SEM (8)
- Newspaper Revenue (3)
- Tablet and Mobile (9)
- Technology & Analytics (6)
Contents:
- Data Preparation for Analytics
- Community Engagement: Moving from Broadcast to Conversations
- Schema.org, Entity Search, and Semantic SEO Tagging
- Responsive Design: One Site for All Devices
- How Mobile Fits Into Your Overall Digital Strategy
- Designing Tablet Reader Apps: Information Architecture
- Designing Tablet Reader Apps: User Experience Design
- Designing Tablet Reader Apps: Content Analysis
- Designing Tablet Reader Apps: Audience and Purpose
- Designing Tablet Reader Apps: More Bells and Fewer Whistles?
- The Work Behind Social Marketing
- Search Engine Marketing (SEM) Tips: Analytics and Performance
- Search Engine Marketing (SEM) Tips: Keyword Management
- Search Engine Marketing (SEM) Tips: Competitive Analysis
- Kids, News, and Video
- Tablets, eBooks, and eLearning Make Middle School Less… Awkward
- Epilogue: The Miranda Proposal, Future and Facts
- The Long Tail of Publishing
- Who Will Develop the Next eBook Platform?
- What is the eBook Platform of Tomorrow?
- The Rise of eBook Applications
- Social Reading: Beyond Gutenberg? Beyond Zuckerberg!
- eBooks and the Triple Bottom Line
- The Future of Books
- Prologue: It’s Time for eBooks to Evolve
- Journatic, The Tribune, and Offshore Outsourced Journalism
- Warren Buffet is No Fool
- The Ultimate News Device: Tablets
- The Future of News: It’s Not About You, It’s About Them
- Newsroom Software: WordPress and Other Open Source Options
- Paywalls: The Wrong Solution for News
- How to Drive Online News Revenue
- Don’t Build Your Own Newsroom
- Digital Editions and Portable News
- Why Photos are Critical to Online News
- Site Analytics: Intelligence Gathering for News Sites
- How To Do SEO Right
- From Newspapers to Digital Media: Follow John Paton
- What is SEO?
- SEO and SEM for News
- Trusted Advertising: The Value of Newspaper Web Sites
- Capitalizing on News Assets
- Where Did Newspapers Go Wrong?
- The Fall of the Newspaper
- Why Blogging Writes?