From The Hip

NZ Herald for iPad Best User Experience?

So the NZ Herald for iPad app was just nominated as an ONYAs finalist in the “Best User Experience” category. A curious choice indeed. I thought I’d recap my ‘experience’ of the app, as a user:

First Launch: “Fuck where’s the mute button, this is a news app, what’s this movie doing playing?! Home Button. Oh it was an ad, lame, can’t I just pay for it instead?”

At this point I contemplated just deleting it. But it was such a bad initial impression, I thought I’d continue delving into the app and see if the rest was as horrible.

Second Launch: “Oh great a different ad… for the app I just launched! What the fuck. Oh it just crashed, what did I do?”

Third Launch: “Sit through the ad again. Ok, 20 seconds later I’m in. Let’s see… hmm general design seems adequate, nothing particularly notable. Hmm those transition animations seem really slooow, these buttons are really unresponsive while stuff loads…”

You get the picture. I find it hard to reconcile this with good user experience. To me, it’s almost the other extreme, a hostile user experience. The app has no business being a ONYAs finalist in this category in my opinion. Curiously the category had four finalists, instead of three “because of the high standard”. Maybe I need to lower my standards?

Edit: As Glen points out, the judges probably reviewed the most recent update, in which the Mercedes ad on launch has been removed (a plus), and crashes less. So that just leaves the totally unnecessary video advertising the app itself which plays on launch, the general unresponsiveness, and sluggish impression given by the animations.

Layton