Mobile apps with a death wish

Customers need to know you’re paying attention, so it’s common for products of any sort to get a fresh coat of paint every few years: updated packaging on soup cans, a makeover on a magazine, a new jingle or slogan, and some small change to the product that justifies slapping a “new and improved” sticker on it.

In mobile apps, where updates seem to come every other day in some cases, we’re seeing that same mentality: Change the app cosmetically at least every so often, so users don’t feel you’ve abandoned the product — or get a reason to try the app again. Unfortunately, many app revisions are terrible, making apps harder to use.

That’s a big problem in mobile, where it’s hard to go back to a previous version. In iOS, you need a backup of the old one, then you reinstall it in iTunes; in Android, there’s no way to do that. Furthermore, the auto-update feature in Android and the forthcoming auto-update feature in iOS 7 will make it even harder to keep or go back to a version you can use. These app developers must have a death wish — when an app goes bad and users can’t roll back, they have one option: Delete it. And they will.

Ironically, media companies seem especially prone to ruin their apps with an ill-advised update — a strange irony when you consider they usually fall down in an area of historic strength: design.

The latest example is the Associated Press’s AP Mobile news app. The previous version was fairly clean and simple, with a list of topics at left that you selected to get the relevant news stories. The new version has a bunch of photo tiles, each representing a topic. One problem is that the photos change constantly, based on the top story for that section. There’s no way to easily go to the section you want — no simple, half-second visual to use. Yes, text is superimposed on the photos, but it’s hard to read. Another issue: Only a few tiles fit on the screen, so you have to scroll a lot to find a desired section. I’ve deleted the app from my iPhone.

This use of gratuitous graphics to obscure information and navigation is a common affliction. USA Today and Reuters suffer from it, though BBC News is a counterexample: It shows an image for every story in each section, but the sections have easy-to-read text labels. Ironically, the idea of a graphic next to each story is the way things used to be, and it works fine so long as the adjacent text is legible. But using changing graphics with superimposed text as the navigation is a horrible idea.

To add insult to injury, the AP Mobile app also shows text as off-white on dark gray — hard to read for many people. The AP designers bolded the text to compensate for the effective shrinking of the text that this light-on-dark effect creates to the human eye, but it’s still tough on the eyes. In some circumstances, light-on-dark text is easier to read, based on the ambient lighting conditions, so it makes sense to provide this display style as an option — as the previous version of the AP Mobile app did. It’s a seriously boneheaded move to remove that choice. It’s a common mistake among young designers, and we’ve seen apps such as TweetDeck make the same mistake, as well as early versions of Android. But they fixed those errors. AP needs to follow suit.

Anyone with design experience knows that text on images and light-on-dark text are hard to read, and changing the graphics on items meant to be icons — visuals that people are expected to understand immediately — defeats the purpose.

The iPad version of AP Mobile commits another sin: On its larger screen, you see the tiles of the changing section photos on one side and a list of stories on the other. Your instinct is to tap the story you want. But nothing happens if you do. That’s because that list is a preview, not a live list. You have to tap the section you want for the section tiles to disappear, revealing the actual list of current stories, which you can then tap. How frustrating! The old AP Mobile app didn’t make that mistake.

USA Today on all devices and Reuters on the iPad are examples of apps that commit another design faux pas that inhibits usability: shrinking text. In both cases, their index screens are unreadable past the lead stories. They’re trying to simulate an old-fashioned print newspaper layout by making the top story bigger and the others smaller. However, the smartphone and tablet screens are already small, and they can be hard enough to read for people over 35. (The Reuters iPhone app ironically, is nicely designed for readability, unlike its iPad version.)

Small text is a problem on small devices, and I’m amazed at how many apps — not just those for media — use small text. It’s clear this is a growing problem. At its recent Worldwide Developers Conference, Apple announced a new facility in iOS 7 that lets users set a universal text size adjustment, and Apple execs publicly urged developers to support it in their apps. Apple realizes that too many apps abuse their users’ eyes and don’t provide flexibility. (Book apps such as the Kindle and iBooks do, and Apple’s essentially standardizing their approach as a systemwide preference for apps to use.)

As a result, both the USA Today and Reuters are too hard to read on a smartphone and not so easy on a tablet. That’s why they’re gone on my iPhone and iPad. I’ve switched to the Retuers website on the iPad — it’s not the greatest news website, but it’s easier to use than the app. I’ve given up on USA Today, as its website commits the same sin as its app.

It is possible to create a tablet app that looks like a traditional newspaper or magazine. The New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, and Economist apps are great examples, especially on the iPad. On the iPhone, the Times and Economist smartly devolve to a list-style presentation, which better fits the small window.

But you don’t have to emulate a dead-trees product to succeed in news presentation in mobile. The LeMonde and BBC apps are decent, using a mix of design cues from the Web, print, and mobile.

Finally there’s the ultimate sin embodied by the Public Radio Player app. Earlier this year, a truly ugly update replaced the previous version, which was serviceable but not elegant. The user interface grew overly complex and harder to navigate. Worse, the app became unreliable — it often doesn’t connect to the the radio station streams or even get the list of local stations. The level of outrage in user comments is high. My solution: I deleted it everywhere and replaced it with the NPR News app, whose news feed is not so comprehensive but whose Stations feature lets me find and save local public radio stations for streaming — what the Public Radio Player app used to do before its ill-advised face-lift.

“Usability” and “design thinking” are popular buzzwords these days. They really are what app developers should be optimizing for. But too few actually deliver on making apps both usable and functional.

This article, “Mobile apps with a death wish,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Galen Gruman’s Mobile Edge blog and follow the latest developments in mobile technology at InfoWorld.com. Follow Galen’s mobile musings on Twitter at MobileGalen. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.