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BREAKING NEWS & VIEWS
Vogue iPhone App Connects Users With Advertisers  of fashionista wannabes for generations. With the new and perhaps overdesigned VogueStylist iPhone app, Condé Nast effectively turns the “fashion bible” into the “mobile fashion catalog,” and brings readers closer to advertisers and closer to the actual purchase than ever before. Released yesterday into the Apple App Store, VogueStylist puts the ad pages front and center in letting users assemble their own wardrobes from the current issue’s sponsors. A Stylist section identifies a handful of key new trends from which you can pull together items from sponsors or snapshots of your own items into ensembles. At points in the app, users also can take snapshots of ads in Vogue and add those items into the mix as well. A Shop section reproduces the ad pages from the current issue of the magazine and renders the pages into catalogs of items with full descriptions and click-throughs to the manufacturers’ online e-commerce site. Often the user is just a couple of clicks away from making a purchase. Each of the app’s sections is wonderfully browsable and, in many cases, recreates that page-flipping ritual that many women enjoy with every issue of the magazine. Whether—and to what degree—users actually engage the interactivity of an app like this remains to be seen. Getting users to create and share their own ensembles is a challenge. Ironically, VogueStylist mimics the successful model that Polyvore pioneered online. That upstart user-generated fashion site is in many ways the anti-Vogue—a bottom-up social network of fashion lovers who assemble personal looks from the e-commerce sites that are already on the Web as well as advertising partners. VogueStylist creaks a bit under its own design. The ways in which each section work, and work with each other, can be disorienting. The Stylist, Wardrobe and Shop sections have somewhat different interfaces, which can make the user feel a bit like an easily befuddled model. The functionality of some buttons such as “Refresh” or “Lock” in the Stylist section are not clear. What are we refreshing or locking and unlocking...and why? Generally there are too many buttons and functions that the user is left to intuit. The total experience just doesn’t flow as seamlessly as one would hope. Still, VogueStylist is a unique entry into the headlong rush of magazines onto the iPhone. Literally scores of apps have appeared in recent months as the major publishers try to prove to readers, advertisers and perhaps to themselves that they really are ready for an age of digital devices. Like many of these projects, iPhone versions often feel like a test of richer and deeper projects that publishers are planning for larger mobile devices like the next generation of tablets and the Apple iPad. Many of the images and operations in magazine facsimile apps like Esquire and GQ, for instance, seem made for a larger screen. The ad reproductions in VogueStylist, as well, are generally ineffective when reproduced at this handheld scale. The iPhone is proving to be, at the very least, a testing ground for the larger mobile canvas most magazines seem to crave. If you have breaking news to share please contact Steve Smith at ssmith@accessintel.com COMMENTS
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