Category: iPad

Newsstand: What I wish it did

I’ve had a little over a week to look over the new iOS on my iPad.  Not surprisingly, I am using the Newsstand app more than any of the other new features (although we had a really fun time on Friday locating a colleague’s iPhone on the new iCloud – turns out, it was in her bag the whole time).  Newsstand is a feature that has been a long time coming, and as such, it was probably at least slightly over-hyped.

Since we’re working on a magazine project this quarter, I am a big fan of the background downloading.  Prior to the new OS, it would often take me 10 minutes or more to download each new issue of each magazine.  Now, they download as they become available, without needing to have the app open.  For anyone who was using magazine apps before the change, this feature seems intuitive and easy to use.  I do wish, however, that the Newsstand app had it’s own settings that over-rode the individual app settings.  That way, I wouldn’t have to opt-in to every app’s background download.

CNET’s Scott Stein agrees.  “Newsstand was one of the iOS 5 features that I’d been long awaiting, because I dreamed it would be a way of integrating books, periodicals, and all reading material into one destination. Alas, that’s not the case here.”

He argues that the ideal location for his Newsstand apps would be inside of the iBooks app, so that he could keep all of his reading together.

I was also hoping that Newsstand would make it easy to manage my subscriptions.  I have subscribed to a number of magazines on the iPad for which I do not have print subscriptions.  For some of these subscriptions, I chose a monthly fee, because I needed the magazine only for this quarter while I worked on the project, or because I wasn’t sure I would enjoy the magazine.  For some subscriptions, I chose the yearly subscription, knowing I would want to read the magazine long after the project.  Still other magazines are single issue downloads.  I was really hoping that the Newsstand would allow me to easily see this information, but I still have to log in to my iTunes account to figure this out.

Gizmodo, on the other hand, finds Newsstand “more awesome than it seems.”  The tech news site loved how the app allows them to see the covers of the issues instead of a generic app icon.  It is easier to know if new issues are available.

I wish that all of my magazine apps were supported in the Newsstand.  Currently, I have several other magazines in various groupings on multiple pages.  Before the new OS update, all of my magazines were grouped together, which I found exceedingly convenient, and I’ll have to wait until that can happen again before I can truly evaluate the system.

A focus group of one

Seven days ago, Apple co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs died at 56 after a long battle with pancreatic cancer.  Apple fans across the world showed love and support for the man, the brand, and his family, often through a medium that Jobs himself was responsible either for creating or for promoting.

I was down on Chicago’s Michigan Avenue on Sunday to one, buy a suit for interviewing, and two, shoot some photos for photojournalism, and came across an Apple Store covered in multi-colored Post-Its with messages for Jobs and his family.  And one-by-one people walked up, left a message on the wall or an apple on the ground, snapped a photo with their iPhone, and went on their way.

Jobs was not a fan of focus groups, audience research or user testing.  I am also not a fan of those things.  He believed that often with groundbreaking technology people had no idea what they wanted until you told them what was possible.  He was, among other things, an excellent salesman of the possible.

I, on the other hand, simply do not like conducting these interviews.  It’s not that I don’t see their value, although I do challenge the audience Kool-aid that says that we should simply ask people what they want and then give it to them.

In journalism school, it is expected that students inherently know how to talk to people about a product that they are working on.  They’re supposed to know exactly how to express a sense of empathy and immediately build a rapport with random strangers who the journalists are supposed to miraculously find on street corners and in coffee shops and convince to dedicate 20 minutes of their lives to answering a journalist’s prying questions about their lives.  Professors and administrators do not seem to see that there is a difference between this type of interviewing and interviewing someone for a story.

Audience research is very, very good at finding out what people like and how they behave.  Unfortunately, even the first man who bought an iPad has only been using it for fewer than 2 years.  And his world of experience is limited to the type of apps and interactivity that a small group of developers has been able to dream up.  And of that very small group, only a very few of those are doing any sort of groundbreaking work, while the others are using their innovations to display content.  So, essentially, the ideas of a couple of men and women are the sum of iPad experiences that exist.  And asking an iPad user what they like can only encompass those ideas.

We can ask people to imagine what they would like, but they will still be limited to their experience of interacting with the device.  Even the truly visionary random man on the street might suggest something that we couldn’t possibly execute.

We’re warned about the dangers of the “focus group of one:” essentially using only your own experience to make decisions.  We’re especially warned about that in our class.  As a group of 13 girls and one boy, we have chosen to create a magazine for men.  As a group of 23 to 28-year-olds, we’ve chosen men age 35-55, which for most of us means neither our friends nor our fathers.

And so, if you need me on Saturday, I’ll be hanging out at a Starbucks in Skokie, stalking men with iPads and asking to see some ID.

…And it’s shiny

As some of you may know, this quarter I’m working on developing an iPad-native magazine.  Because the iPad is so new, it presents a unique challenge.  Basically, the only thing we know about iPad users are their basic demographics and that, for the most part, they don’t really know how they’re using the tablet.  What I mean is, iPad users don’t know if they want interactivity or static pages, they don’t know if they want videos to autoplay or to wait for their cue, and they certainly don’t know what an iPad magazine should look like.

Which should make our job really easy, right?

Just take the best of what is out there, and combine it into something shiny and new, and there you go: an iPad magazine.

Except that it’s hard to start without a starting point.

Former Apple CEO Steve Jobs has a philosophy regarding user testing.  To paraphrase: people don’t have any idea what they want until we tell them that they want it.  I like this for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that it would mean I don’t have to stalk iPad users in coffee shops to ask them to do a “card-sorting” activity, whatever that is.  What I really like though is the idea that, while subject and tone can be determined by audience interviews and market research, the way it is all packaged and presented may not even exist yet.  And instead of asking people what they like, which, inevitably, will be limited to what they’ve already experienced, we can tell people what they’re going to like a year from now by dreaming up something people didn’t even know they wanted (ahem, iPod).

There is also this intangible quality that the iPad has by virtue of its newness.  Everything that is created for it right now is cool and innovative.  We’re just on the cusp of that no longer being the case, the point at which people have enough experience with this shiny new toy to know what they like, and more importantly, what they don’t.

But right now, in this moment (or at least the moment that lasts between now and Christmas), why not tell people what they like and need in an iPad magazine and shift the conversation that is happening around this new device?

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