The launch of Apple’s iPad set off speculation about whether the device could save the news industry, and many of the first apps came from established outfits — the New York Times, AP News, BBC News. Jakob Nielsen’s early usability study of several of those media apps found the opposite of a rescue. The apps were “inconsistent and have low feature discoverability, with frequent user errors due to accidental gestures”, and an “overly strong print metaphor and weird interaction styles cause further usability problems”.
The inconsistency was basic: touching a picture might enlarge it, link to another page, or do nothing at all, depending on the app. More revealing was where that came from. Publishers had ported print practice wholesale, so navigation ran article-to-article by swipe, as a reader would turn a page — a metaphor strong enough, Nielsen noted, that in some apps a headline on the cover page could not be tapped to reach the article beneath it.
That linear model sits badly on a medium where the reader chooses what comes next, and Nielsen’s report put the cause down to designs emphasising author authority over user empowerment: “Early designs err on the side of being too restrictive. Using the Web has given people an appreciation for freedom and control, and they’re unlikely to happily revert to a linear experience.”
It was a preliminary report on a newly launched device. What the first wave of apps did show was publishers reaching for the practices they already had — Marshall McLuhan’s rear-view mirror, marching backwards into the future.