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The ABC News iPad app is a stinking heap of FAIL. | FailABC News is really proud of their new iPad app, which they call "your fully optimized site for your iPad." If this is what device optimization looks like, we are all in big trouble. On the left is the standard, ordinary ABC News home page. It might be a little dry, but it has an extremely high information density, with literally dozens of clean, quick, descriptive headlines and efficiently cropped images to get you straight through to all of the latest news with a single click. "Politics", "Health", "World News", etc. are all quickly accessible across the top of the page, single clicks taking you to equally content-rich pages.And then we come to the iPad app (right), which is about as information-light as possible—you can scarcely read more than one headline at a time, via a "globe" interface on which the positions of the articles have no correlation to their geographic locations whatsoever. How do you find more news? "Spin the globe with a swipe of your finger... Shake your iPad to shuffle up the articles and videos... " If there's one single way in which this app is a better or less laborious way to find and experience news than their regular website, it escapes us. This is a classic example of form following function, only to catch up to it and viciously club it over the head. | |
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