When the hype settles what will most people use their iPad for? Games? Probably. Internet? Certainly? Apps? Yeah, but what kind?

That’s the question our firm is asking. We don’t build games, so what kind of “serious” software are companies going to invest in? 

I think a lot of people, Apple included, believe content delivery is one of the top 2 or 3 use cases for the iPad. Theoretically, the iPad and its beautiful everything are the best way to receive digital content and multimedia. So far, I would agree with that. For my road test I read the Sunday news on an iPad while drinking coffee and looking out the window, and the experience was awesome.  Ummm, but I didn’t use the NYT app, nor any other app, I used a browser.

If there isn’t anything good to say then it’s best to say nothing. No doubt. But how much fun is that?

The NYT app has been hyped by Apple ever since Steve Jobs announced the iPad. In the run-up to last Saturday (release day) it was difficult to find an official iPad screenshot without the NYT logo displayed prominently. Content delivery via app was supposed to be a big deal. 

Honestly, it sucks!

Compared to using NYTimes.com, well, there is no comparison. Nobody is going to use that app and come back regularly. At least not in any serious numbers. Same goes for the other newspaper apps available on the iPad.

 
Note to app designers: If you are building an iPad app for content delivery then your competition is the web.  Surfing websites on iPad is out-of-the-box slick and if your ambition is content delivery then you have a lot of catch-up work to do just to get even with the web experience.

The NYT app, called “NYT Editors’ Choice” is an incredibly lazy uninspired attempt at content delivery.  The app gives the user a fraction of the content available from NYTimes.com and offers nothing in return for its numerous annoying limitations. It doesn’t even have pinch-zoom or any cool features. It’s just really bland. 

But…even if it weren’t bland, even if it were the “Harry Potter news paper”, I’m wondering if it would still suck?  I think so.

ASK WHY

If you sell apps and can get a million people to download your app for a buck, cha-ching.  But if your business is content delivery, especially with advertising, you don’t care as much about downloads…you care about “hang time”. People must actually use your app, return to it regularly, and linger. 

I think this is the most important question. The question isn’t why would someone download an app, let’s face it, people will download anything that’s free and try it once.  You want people to use your app every day, hang around, check out the scenery (i.e. the ads), and tell all their friends how much they enjoyed the experience.

Consumers are like water, they flow toward the path of least resistance.  If your app isn’t THE VERY BEST way for the consumer to receive content, the consumer will not use the app.  In most cases, I think iPad owners are more likely to prefer a website over an app for receiving identical content.

The question is why would anyone prefer an app when they have a really slick browser handy?  The most obvious reason is to be able to enjoy content when there is no WiFi or 3G signal. If that’s the usability narrative then we should be building entire experiences around that…i.e. do offline really well.  However, with the NYT app and the other iPad news apps, including the best of class (USA Today), the offline capabilities aren’t apparent.  There is no indication that the software is caching content, or how much of the paper has been synched.  Imagine getting ready for your trip. You want to load your iPad with news so you can read on the plane. First, you boot the app (since iPad apps don’t run in the background). Then, you need to let it “soak” for….ummm…how long exactly? There’s no way to know.  You might find yourself on the plane reading news from six weeks ago. Grrr!

On a mobile device people seem to enjoy apps for some things. For example: stocks, weather, sports scores, and that sort of thing. Funny how the same people probably prefer websites for identical information when they get to their desktop or laptop. I’d say the reason for the app preference seems to be a combination of off-line accessibility, and better-than-browser user experience (mobile browsers are slow to load pages and don’t have all the cool animation).

If NYT would have hired us (they didn’t), I would have questioned the whole plan to make a content delivery app.  Unless you are going to knock it out of the park, why bother doing content? Speaking as a product designer, I think a far better choice for them would have been an iPad crossword puzzle app, not a content delivery app.  A crossword puzzle attracts people in real numbers, they come every day, it’s perfect for an app, it’s small, you can do some mind-blowing special effects, and you can easily crosslink **breaking news** to the website or other company-operated property.  iPad is the hardware that a crossword puzzle was invented to live on!

If the plan is to rehost content in a fancy RSS or PDF-inspired reader, forget it. Nobody will care.

You either need content that is only accessible via your app, or your need something richly interactive that makes the app a clear winner over the website.

The one thing I learned from poking around with iPad for 3 days is that the web browsing experience is fantastic. It’s way better than iPhone.  Rich media content delivery is going to be through two channels: (1) the browser; (2) the e-reader.  If you plan to deliver content through a channel that’s not one of those, better do something really cool.