Simply put, today’s organizations need their web properties to run on all devices. Web developers are responding with HTML5, which in terms of interface design, offers a fairly smooth continuum: the site changes, and in most cases degrades thoughtfully and gracefully, as the screen resolution shrinks.
Read MoreHow Mobile Fits Into Your Overall Digital Strategy
It’s 2013, so I shouldn’t have to tell you that enterprises need a mobile strategy. After all, computer sales are waning, and pretty soon the majority of Earth’s population will have smartphones. Actually, I’m pretty sure we are already there.
Read MoreDesigning Tablet Reader Apps: Information Architecture
In my previous post I discussed navigation, search, and the LATCH model for user experience design. This post presents a few more “best practices” in tablet reader app design.
Read MoreDesigning Tablet Reader Apps: User Experience Design
User Experience Design (UXD) practitioners know that every user interface project begins with certain basic principles of information architecture. Just to be clear, some people use the term “user interface design” interchangeably with UXD, but really, building an interface is just part of the user experience puzzle.
Read MoreDesigning Tablet Reader Apps: Content Analysis
In my previous post on designing a tablet reader interface I discussed personas and goal analysis (audience and purpose). There is one more area for analysis before you start creating the user interface, or even the basic wireframes (architectural drawings): you need to consider the content.
Read MoreDesigning Tablet Reader Apps: Audience and Purpose
Before you can work on any digital user interface, whether a web site, tablet reader, or mobile property, you need to ask questions about audience and purpose. Who is my audience? How many distinct types of users are in that audience?
Read MoreDesigning Tablet Reader Apps: More Bells and Fewer Whistles?
I’ve been keen to address this headline that appeared in Mashable almost three months ago: “Tablet Readers Don’t Want Interactivity, Says Hearst President.” Naturally, my first reaction was (in imitation of my daughter’s use of New York emphasis), “Seriously???” I mean, can you imagine the entire demographic of iPad users not wanting interactivity?
Read MoreThe Ultimate News Device: Tablets
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...
Read MoreDigital Editions and Portable News
I just returned from Publishing Expo 2012 in London, where I was interested (among many other things) to see what newspaper and magazine publishers were doing in the area of offline delivery, or content-to-go. Print has long had the advantage of being able to travel easily with the reader. So in the transition from print to digital delivery, the ability to save stories on a device for offline viewing (available when there is no Internet connection, such as in a subway or on an airplane) is still a necessary requirement. It’s worth mentioning that subway systems and airlines are already experimenting with wireless Internet, so “offline storage options” can be considered a transitional technology until the day, not too far off, when the Internet cloud will available almost everywhere. When that happens, offline portability of news will cease to matter. This is already a vision that companies like Microsoft and Google are touting for corporate information and office applications. But today I am interested in what publishers are doing with digital editions–the online version laid out more or less precisely like their print edition–and how many are moving toward tablet and mobile apps capable of storing articles on the device. Last week I received an email from Ziff-Davis, a reasonably forward-thinking magazine publisher, announcing that they were abandoning digital editions for one of the titles I subscribe to: “To ensure we focus our innovation on channels that have proven most useful for our readers, we will no longer be sending .pdf versions of CIO Insight, otherwise known as Digital Editions. We experimented with this over the last few months and have now decided to put it on hold. We expect you will continue to enjoy our always improving content through the major channels highlighted above.” Those “major channels” included their web site content and their tablet and mobile editions. In a recent post I wrote about how different media need to be supported by different interface models; online is a very different user experience from print, and just placing the print edition online (as a PDF) isn’t really a valid model for the way people want to consume articles online....
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