Evan Blackwell
Unit 3 Writing Assignment
Option B (mobile optimized)
In Unit 3, we’ve learned that designing for the small screen of mobile devices is a difficult task. There are numerous factors working against designers – small screens, different methods of user input and download speeds just being a few.
However, progress is being made with usability. And while it’s still unfortunately easy to find examples of poor design, many app publishers are recognizing their weaknesses and making attempts to fix them.
For my critique, I reviewed an app that did just that – the iPhone app for national daily newspaper USA Today. I used my iPhone 4S for the review.
Overview
Just like Nielsen and Budiu’s example of the Wall Street Journal, USA Today redesigned its mobile app in the spring of 2012. According to various news accounts, the newspaper’s publishers felt the publication’s previous app didn’t do a good enough job presenting breaking news content to its mobile users quickly and in a pleasing way. In other words, the app demonstrated poor usability.
So, I decided to take a look and see how the new, current iteration of the USA Today app does.
Startup
USA Today is a free app, and the good news is users don’t get bombarded with any sort of subscription pitch or account registration when they enter the app, because the newspaper’s online content isn’t premium. It’s all free.
What users do get on their initial visit is a very slick visual tutorial on how the navigation of the app will work.
White arrows overlay the screen showing the user where the main navigation menu is, how to swipe between sections and how to pull down on the page to refresh. You can see this in Image 1. All of these notations – the swiping, the pull-down to refresh – are common conventions for iPhone users.
The “How-to” overlay disappears with a simple tap and the user is then taken to the main News section screen (which basically serves as the app’s home page) to see the top stories.
Another instructional overlay appears when the user clicks on the navigation menu in the upper left corner for the first time. You can see this in Image 2.
This overlay, which uses the same graphical treatment with the white arrows, shows the user how to reach the settings area, how you can tap to reach each section in the main menu and identifies locations at the bottom for audio and video stories. As with the previous “How-to” this one also disappears with one tap.
More of these instructional animations appear throughout the app the first time you land on a page. Another great example is the first time you enter an article, one appears which instructs the user to tap the photo to make a caption appear.
This technique for instructions was an engaging interface for an initial experience and was similar to the example Nielsen cited with Foodspotting (page 84 – Mobile Usability).
Main news page
Because it is a daily publication, and it has a very recognizable brand name as “America’s newspaper,” USA Today has a pretty obvious goal with its mobile app to deliver breaking news content to its users in an easily digestible way.
The News > Top Stories page is the home page of the app. Each story on the page has a time stamp to indicate urgency, as you can see in Image 3.
Nielsen pointed out the importance of full headlines, easy-to-read headlines and bigger touch targets for users to tap to access a story when pointing out good usability practices and redesign changes for the mobile site AllKpop (page 69 – Mobile Usability). All of those elements can be seen on this USA Today page in Image 3.
Navigating through the news
One of the few unappealing elements to USA Today’s app from a usablity perspective is the fact that the main navigation menu is placed behind a very non-descript icon in the left corner that’s easy to overlook. However, this is pretty easily overcome by the aforementioned graphical instructions that point it out to the user and the fact that it’s located up in the upper left corner – a conventional location where users are typically used to look for navigation.
USA Today is famous for its color – each different section of the newspaper has a distinct color - and the branding of those colors is carried over well to the app.
Each section is easily identifiable, and tappable, both by name and by color in the main navigation menu as seen in Image 4.
The navigation menu’s main categories, or sections, are easy to distinguish in the left column, with the second level of navigation, or secondary navigation, in the right column.
Reading the news
Users of the USA Today app generally receive very little pain in their primary goal – reading and watching news content.
During the 2-3 days I was reviewing the app, a huge news story was taking place – the catastrophic typhoon that hit the Philippines. Each time I checked the app, which was multiple times a day over the course of those 2-3 days, articles about the typhoon with clearly marked timestamps from within the hour were always visible among the top stories on the News page.
As written previously, the main content pages in each section are very user friendly with the clear headlines, excerpts and thumbnail images. In addition, stories with video content are indicated with a play button over the thumbnail – a very common convention to web users.
The presentation remains clean and easy to read after tapping to reach the individual story level, as seen in Image 5. There are easy to identify buttons at the top of the screen to go Back, and to share the article on social media.
The example of the typhoon story in Image 5 contained video, which again is clearly indicated with the arrow on the image. The video opened seamlessly for me within the same window, as seen in Image 6.
Summary
The USA Today iPhone app provided a good user experience. It overcomes many of the limitations inherent to mobile app design and users seeking quick, easy access to news content from a familiar brand name will receive it from this app.