Are you wondering why iPad apps, especially news reading apps like Flipboard, Wired and WSJ, keep getting so much praise and media attention? Well let’s do a head-to-head comparison of The Wall Street Journal iPad Edition and Online Edition (WSJ.com). Why do you think users prefer the WSJ iPad app?
WSJ iPad Edition (click to enlarge)
WSJ.com Landing Page (click to enlarge)
When put in these terms the choice should seem obvious. It actually is. Most websites overwhelm their customers with far too much information and far too many choices. If I simply want to read the morning paper (the primary WSJ use case), the iPad app is better-suited to doing that, even independent of the specialized iPad hardware. Consider how many words, links and pictures there are on the WSJ.com Online Edition. If you studiously read every word and studied every picture, how long would that take you? Of course users don’t read every word, they scan, but you are forcing your users to do far more work to find the information they do care about.
I also believe despite its “lack of features” the iPad Edition is just about as functional as the Online Edition. Most of what most users are looking for most of the time can be found in the iPad app. That’s who you should design for, your majority. Design for the majority of a specific target customer with a minority of features. My rule of thumb is the Pareto Principle: 20% of your features deliver 80% of your product’s utility. Do not design for the corner cases, especially at the outer layer of the onion (ie the first part of your product customers interact with). WSJ.com was designed by committee and designed by feature creep. It was designed by “Hey why don’t we throw in XYZ feature!” I am not opposed to WSJ.com containing all the features they have, but they certainly shouldn’t all be on the landing page. In reality, though, it can be difficult for a company to force discipline and simplify. I’ve seen it before in the real world. Why? Because somewhere in The Wall Street Journal‘s offices a coversation such as this would take place:
Product Marketing: Our data says that many users find our website confusing and overwhelming. They prefer the simplified iPad edition. Let’s start simplifying. Why don’t we move the Personalized Stock Quotes off the landing page?
Web Manager: Oh, no we can’t ditch the Personalized Stock Quotes. They get a good number of clicks. Do you want to lose all those clicks?
The problem with this conversation is that it takes a fixed pie, zero sum approach to product design. This is not how the world works. Removing a feature doesn’t mean you “lose.” This viewpoint doesn’t even begin to account for all the clicks lost / never had due to a confusing and overwhelming website. In fact, a simplified site could enlarge the pie and drive more total clicks to the things you really care about.
I am telling many of the startups I advise to conceptually “design for the iPad, not for the web.” It’s too easy to create an overly chromed-out website from the get-go. The iPad is a great design tool in that it forces trade-offs. (Unbeknownst to most people, trade-offs are actually the critical factor that drives the greatest innovation and the best products. It is the iPhone’s lack of a physical keyboard that makes it great, even though that makes it harder to type on.) Apple understands trade-offs. Products that try to be everything to everyone usually fail. They fail because they don’t have a target customer in mind and thus have to keep adding on extra features to accommodate every possible user and use case. In the end you, you wind up with Windows Vista.
So why are iPad apps such as Flipboard and WSJ getting so much attention? It’s because they are easy to use. They make reading the news what it should be, fun, as opposed to work, which is what WSJ.com feels like. They look nothing like most of the crap we put up with in HTML. Some of this can be attributed to the natural product value advantages of the iOS SDK over HTML (as I’ve previously written about) and some of this can be attributed to the great design decisions and trade-offs the iPad is fostering.
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