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BREAKING NEWS & VIEWS
The Week on iPad: Speed Reading the TabletMonday, February 13, 2012 Apps are proving to be versatile arrows in the smart publisher's quiver. They allow a magazine many creative ways to communicate their .PNG) brand value, from basic look and feel, to feature set, enhancements, and sheer utility. Esquire and Vanity Fair on tablets, for instance, translate their physical magazine attributes, especially their balanced use of image and text, to reiterate the experience of the print monthly on the device. The New Yorker stresses the reading experience by optimizing the screen for lean-back and lengthy consumption. The Week on iPad has chosen to design every aspect of its magazine app around the principle of speed – the quick read. The U.K. brand from Sir Felix Dennis has made a big splash in the U.S. in recent years by growing its circulation when other news weeklies were in notorious decline. Its digest format aggregated, summarized and shrunk the torrents of news and cultural information for us at just that point when the Internet was overwhelming us with relentless data. The app is a good example of letting the brand’s core values guide app design rather than being slavishly devoted to mag app expectations. This ethic of brevity informs all aspects of this very strong, unconventional, but at times disorienting magazine app. From the start, The Week on iPad breaks convention by actually downloading each issue within ten seconds on a WiFi connections. They have succeeded in overcoming one of the chief complaints against magazine apps – ridiculous download times. But they do so by breaking the magazine aesthetic and pulling the issue apart. Once you open the issue, the contents feel closer to a feed reader (albeit a very good one) than a re-constituted print product. The many signature sections of the magazine familiar to readers (“The World at a Glance”, “Best Columns”, “Best Properties on the market”) become a left rail of navigation buttons, calling up each of the sections as thumbnails and lead blurbs in the right pane. Once you tap into each article, you can either navigate backwards to the home position or move laterally through the section and even the full contents of the magazine. One of the small bits of design smarts we like is that all images in articles can zoom to fill the screen without resolution loss. Why isn’t this a convention in all magazine apps by now? This navigation scheme can be a bit confusing at first, especially in the “at a glance” sections where the user can’t see until entering an article that he or she can traverse the pieces in the section by tapping push pins on the respective world maps. Rather than swiping through text articles, the user has to move to buttons. The map interface is a clever iteration of the magazine’s similar mapping of the week’s stories, but in this case the pins can be unresponsive, especially when they get clustered in a batch of stories from the Middle East where the push pins are packed too tightly even for slender fingers to navigate. Also limiting are the sharing tools. We like that the full text contents of the articles are emailed easily into the body of a message, but there are no social sharing tools here. Also missing are any embedded links to the full original pieces The Week is “digesting” for us or a way to save articles for later reading. All of these interactive conveniences would be relatively easy to implement and make the experience stronger. The Week app also includes a Rolex-sponsored “Daily Briefing,” which pulls down a morning top ten list of news items you need to know. The app emphasizes the magazine’s core values – brevity, concision, speed. But again, we also wish it gave us the option to drill deeper and link to the originals of the aggregated stories. The Week has wisely come onto the iPad with an irresistible offer – the first 12 issues free to users. This deep sampling model also shows how well the publication understands its readership. The Week is the kind of magazine you miss when you stop receiving it. The $4.99 a month iPad subscription will seem like a bargain to most people who get hooked. And thankfully, the subscriber authentication system, a serious choke point for many mag apps, is flexible. We were able to enter a home address to get authenticated when we didn’t have a magazine nearby. It is also good to see two sponsors, Rolex and Lexus, step up to sponsor these early issues. Rolex has a deep integration with the Daily Briefing and an animated interstitial in the issue. The Lexus ad is more static but clicks through to a Web site that is optimized well for the tablet. The Week on iPad made some brave design decisions here by breaking with magazine app nomenclature. It succeeds overall in its mission of designing around brand values. Some readers may miss the more magazine-like experience, but something has to give if publishers are determined to re-think their received notions of a magazine on these new devices. Still, some further tweaking is needed to make The Week all it could be here.  If you have breaking news to share please contact Steve Smith at ssmith@accessintel.com
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