March 2011
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Month March 2011

Entries 4 Total

“We had to have the user experience down cold.”

Mar 21, ’11 1:22 PM

The New York Times is preparing to take a second foray into paid content, and echoes of their 2005-2007′s Times Select resonate as they craft the new plan.

NY Times CEO Janet L. RobinsonOne of the major reasons cited for the failure of the Times Select experiment was the difficulty people had getting to content once they’d paid for it. Whether through a lack of focus on user experience, budgets spent in the wrong place, or simple inexperience with designing for users, they ended up building a paywall that flummoxed paying users and blocked the sharing and linking that is the lifeblood of the Web.

Time will tell if the new attempt to put a fair market price on quality journalism will succeed. Comments from CEO Janet L. Robinson, however, show that they’ve learned important lessons from the past.

“That is one of the things we learned with TimesSelect,” said Janet L. Robinson, chief executive of the company. “We had to have the user experience down cold.”

[NY Times]

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iPad 2, as experienced by a first-time tablet user

Mar 20, ’11 11:05 PM

iPad2Paul Stamatiou has never used a tablet, and by his own account is not much of an early adopter. The 24 year old “developer and startup guy” shares his thoughts on owning an iPad 2 as his first tablet.

In Paul’s words, “It is all about the apps and experience. Hardware matters only so much as it doesn’t impede the experience.”

[Paul Stamatiou]

 

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A better way to ask Facebook users for app permissions

Mar 20, ’11 5:33 AM

Facebook apps make it easy for developers to connect with users and gather necessary info, but they also come loaded with scary-sounding requirements like “This app is going to have access to all your personal data, photos, home address, and children’s blood type.”

What do you do if you want to let people engage gradually, only granting permission for things when the app really needs them?

Arthur Chang has figured it out, and shared his solution with the world. Hop over to his site for a method using one FQL query.

This method will result in more users signing up when they see that they can actually access the app without having to let it write to their wall before they’ve even found out what it does in the first place.

[ArtChang.com]

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It’s still unclear whether having Flash is better than not having Flash.

Mar 20, ’11 1:25 AM

Motorola’s Xoom tablet has finally added Flash support – one of the features that was touted as a differentiator versus the iPad. As Technologizer points out, the First Law of Mobile Flash seems to be “the version you want is always not quite here yet.”

Technical issues aside (and there are many), Flash remains a tool primarily for mouse-based UIs, not multitouch UIs. It’s notoriously difficult to design for an environment in which you don’t know whether the user can mouseover or not, whether they can use multitouch gestures or not, whether there needs to be scrollbars vs. draggable content, and you don’t even know if the pointing device will be a pixel-accurate mouse pointer or an inaccurate finger.

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