I’ve installed The Guardian’s new Wordpress plug-in on this blog, and this is my first try at publishing a FULL Guardian article. Bravo to The Guardian for having the vision to push its content out in this way and leverage the power of letting go and turning the Web outside of its walled garden into a revenue opportunity. To the rest of the legacy news media: TAKE NOTE! -Steve

This article was written by Jack Schofield, for guardian.co.uk on Wednesday 2nd June 2010 13.07 UTC

Apple’s iPad has usability problems, and shows an “overemphasis on aesthetics”, according to usability guru Dr Jakob Nielsen, who has just published a free 93-page report on iPad usability. He was in London last month where his company, Nielsen Norman Group, was holding a usability conference. Since he had an iPad in his hotel room, I asked him how well it had turned out.

“In some ways, less well than I expected,” he said. “There were really a lot of usability problems in this first-generation of iPad applications. It’s often quite difficult for people to discover what they have to do because the options are not very visible. I have to say of both the device itself and the content, it’s very attractive, which is good. But at the same time, overemphasising the attractiveness and hiding the functionality, that does cause problems.”

Nielsen also thinks “there are things Apple has done that diminish usability. For example, they don’t have some standard things like font size control so you can define big, small or medium text. With no font preferences, every designer can do a picture-perfect layout on every screen, because they don’t have to reflow the text accordingly, which is what websites should always do,” he says.

“The second compounding issue is that everything is different. If you pick up a few different magazine apps, every one of them will treat the articles and pictures differently. How do you go to the next article? It’s different in each application, the problem being that then you can’t learn.

“When it comes to reading a magazine, the interest should come from the content, not the interface to that content. You don’t want to have to struggle with ‘how does this work?’ I don’t think [Apple] have detailed-enough guidelines, which partly comes from them pushing it out too quickly.”

But, I reply, surely people are used to dealing with different applications on the web.

“They are, but they also don’t like that!” Nielsen says. “But I think the web has by now evolved a fairly large set of conventions, so it’s relatively well known how to deal with basic things.” For example, with a long article you can either scroll or sometimes click for the next page. “You can certainly do it differently, but any website that does it differently will have problems.”

Nielsen says that some of the iPad’s problems are endemic to the touch tablet format. “With the iPad, it’s very easy to touch in the wrong place, so people can click the wrong thing, but they can’t tell what happened,” he says. There are also problems with gestures such as swiping the screen because they’re “inherently vague”, and “lack discoverability”: there’s no way to tell what a gesture will do at any particular point.

“People don’t know what they can do, and when they try to do something, they don’t even know what they did, because it’s invisible,” Nielsen explains. “With a mouse, you can click the wrong thing, but you can see where you clicked.”

Lack of consistency and lack of discoverability are problems that should worry Apple, because they have been its strength for decades. Discoverability was the core attraction of the Mac’s pull-down menus when it was launched in 1984, and the main reason Apple opted for having only one button on the mouse. “One of the great successes of the Macintosh was that it had very detailed human-interface guidelines for how applications should work,” says Nielsen. “In those days, as a Mac owner, you could pick up another application and just use it, whereas as a PC owner, if you bought another application, it was another user interface – completely different.”

So does he have a view on the Adobe Flash versus HTML5 bun-fight, because Flash isn’t generally known for its usability.

“For once, I’m on the side of Flash,” he says, “because I think Apple is trying to over-rigidly control what’s on its devices. I can understand there are benefits to doing that, but there are also benefits to the diversity of the internet. Diversity is a very powerful mechanism. In the early days of the web, there were many alternatives that were closed services – AOL, CompuServe, Trilogy – but on the web, anybody could put up anything, including a lot of bad stuff. But users vote with their feet, or their clicks: they can click away from bad Flash and click towards good Flash. It’s a shame Apple is so restrictive on what they allow on the iPad and the iPhone. When a customer has bought a device, it’s theirs; they should be able to see the information they want, and run the applications they want.”

Nielsen adds: “Flash has been quite often mis-used to cause grievances in the user interface. That said, it has also been used in later years for more useful things, such as video. In my view, there’s no real need to change to another technology once we have one that works pretty well. But Apple doesn’t seem to like Adobe, I guess, so they’re pushing that we should change to HTML5. But from the user perspective, which is what I’m trying to advocate, it doesn’t make that much difference. Technically, it doesn’t really matter.”

But don’t we all expect HTML5 to win in the end?

“Five years from now, it’s likely that HTML5 will be a better way of doing video – it’s a very good long-term trend – but that doesn’t mean you should throw out all the existing stuff now,” says Nielsen. “You have to be able to read old formats.” Not everything gets updated.

Of course, I say, another part of the iPad’s appeal to publishers is that they can charge for content that would otherwise be free on the web.

“The one thing we’re still missing is a great business model for content providers,” says Nielsen, “and the iPad gets people to buy magazines by downloading apps. It’s really a sort of midi-payment rather than a micropayment because you’re still buying an aggregation of material in one go. I actually still believe more in micropayments, where you pay for individual things. Micropayments haven’t taken off. It’s one of those areas that has to be fairly centralised: there really has to be one system.”

Microsoft has done it with points on Xbox Live, for one example, so could Facebook do it for the wider web?

“Maybe they could, and they could seed it very well by allowing you earn points from different things you do on their system,” he says. “When they needed to get a critical mass of customers, PayPal gave you for signing up. Facebook could give you the opportunity to gain some points by updating your profile. But they’re trying too hard to leverage friend connections, and almost anything you do to make money off who’s a friend of who will be a privacy violation.”

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010

Today’s tip was spotted in a recent article by Robert Niles of Online Journalism Review, “Keeping Your Job in Journalism.” While the article is aimed at instructing journalists on how to keep their jobs in an era of downsizing and transition-of-the-business-model chaos, one recommendation helps not only the individual journalist, but his or her news company.

Niles urges reporters to promote their content to people most likely to value it. As an example, a beat reporter covering higher education might keep a mailing list of bloggers covering the topic, and e-mail them alerts about new articles he’s published.

That’s excellent advice for the individual. I’d also suggest that it’s good for the company, so much so that company leaders should require that (or at least strongly encourage it) from reporters.

In today’s media-crowded world, no newspaper or TV news show can exist as an island, hoping online users come for a visit. It’s important for journalists at mainstream news organizations to reach out in order to get picked up elsewhere online.

Niles explains:

“Most established news organizations remain clueless about how to promote their work in the social medium of the Internet. Make it your personal responsibility to do better with your work. … Build a list of readers and sources to message whenever you publish a new piece. Facebook and other social networks provide an easy way to start with this. Just create a page and invite readers and sources to become your ‘friends.’

“Give readers easy-to-use tools to forward and share your work. Link to other sources and politely invite other writers and sites that cover your beat to link to you, from time to time.

“When I worked at the Los Angeles Times, a few fellow online editors would hit Google to find discussion boards and fan sites covering people and movies the entertainment section was featuring the next day. We’d e-mail those webmasters links to our stories even before they’d hit the front page of latimes.com. And we often found that those sites sent those stories more traffic than other pages on the Times’ website did.”

Excellent advice. A social media strategy can bring in significant traffic to your website.

In yesterday’s tip I mentioned Herb Caen, the popular columnist who was such a huge part, for so many years, in making the San Francisco Chronicle the top newspaper in town. After Caen died in 1997, the Chronicle was less interesting a paper to many readers in the Bay Area. The paper has had some good columnists since, but none that matched Caen’s celebrity.

Thought Caen won a Pulitzer Prize for his column, it wasn’t exactly “serious journalism.” You read Caen’s daily column for entertaining tidbits about life in “Baghdad By the Bay.” What he wrote about came from letters (yes, the paper kind) and phone calls to him, and from his encounters with San Franciscans and friends on the streets and at parties. No one has quite matched him yet, but I think with the Internet there’s hope that more Herb Caens are on the way.

So for today’s tip, I’d like to encourage local newspapers to create modern-day Herb Caens. Today’s local-happenings and -rumors columnists will be better equipped than Caen was, I think, for getting the pulse of the town. A popular Caen-like columnist will be inundated with tips and rumors via e-mail. He/she will, just as Adam Gaffin at Universal Hub does, track the many local bloggers and establish relationships with them. He/she will monitor local online discussion boards looking for tips. There are so many potential online sources nowadays for a Caen-inspired columnist to dig up new local tidbits.

Today’s Herb Caens will be promoted grandly in print and online, and perhaps do video or podcasts. With a significant marketing campaign, Caen-like celebrity is possible. And so will come online user traffic and ad revenues.

Pardon me for getting nostalgic for a moment, but I worked at the San Francisco Chronicle from 1986 to 1993, and part of that time was spent as a copy editor on the features desk. So I was one of the crew who edited Caen’s daily column, which was typed on an old-fashioned typewriter; his assistant keyed it into the paper’s computers before sending it to us for editing. I’m fairly sure that Herb wouldn’t know what to make of all the technology that’s invaded newspapers in the last decade. I doubt he’d be using it.

But Caen is relevant today. Someone just needs to do a more modern version of him.

Here’s a little bonus tip (since I normally just post once a day here). It’s a video interview I just spotted by Beet.TV with NYTimes.com senior VP and general manager Vivian Schiller about why her website has seen such a dramatic growth in usage. Of course, the removal of TimesSelect, which put some premium content behind a pay wall, has a lot to do with it. But Schiller also cites some new forms of web content that are proving popular.

It’s becoming common nowadays for news organizations to put their videos on Youtube (e.g., NYTimes.com). That’s a smart thing, since it’s increasingly important to reach people with your content wherever they may be. They’re not always going to visit you at your website, but they’re increasingly spending time on social networks and social-media sites like Youtube. So meet them there.

Something that news organizations often miss, however, is sharing their photos on photo-sharing services. Just as you might have a strategy of sharing your videos on Youtube to reach that audience, you also should be feeding your news photos out to sites like Flickr. Especially when a big news story breaks, many online users now know to go to the photo sites to see images — mostly from amateurs. But pro journalism outfits also should be in on this.

At my previous company (driven by user content), we wrote a script that automatically put photos submitted to our sites on Flickr, tagged with our website name and with links back to our site. A nice number of people discovered us on Flickr, then became users. Here’s an example of photos on Flickr fed from YourClimbing.com. (My business partner and I shut down the company last year, so the feed has been shut off.)

This strikes me as one of those “no-brainer” ideas. Yet few news companies do it yet.

In an earlier item I mentioned how some corporate web content management systems lag behind open-source platforms in some ways. One thing I often notice with websites of major news organizations using proprietary CMS’s is that they lack “subscribe to comments” features — which is a common feature on many blogs and websites using open-source platforms, since there are plug-ins available to add this. (This website, built on Wordpress, features subscribe to comments, using a plug-in.)

This is important functionality for any news website; if yours doesn’t already have it, I urge you to consider adding subscribe to comments. It’s simply a great way to keep conversations going. When a user participates in a comment thread attached to an article or other content, he has the option to subscribe to the thread and receive notices when other people respond or participate in the thread.

Indeed, to me it’s annoying when this option isn’t available on a site. Unless I remember to check back, follow-up responses to my own that may be relevant to me — or directed squarely at me — are invisible.

But best serving the user isn’t the only reason to add subscribe to comments. Comment threads can become much longer when subscribe-to-comments is available. Ergo, significant traffic gains.

Of course, there are some cautions:

• Make it super easy for a user to turn off e-mail alerts. If a thread gets too busy, a subscribed user could become annoyed by an onslaught of comment alerts.
• Make a daily digest of alerts available as an option. Then on a busy comment thread, a user will just get one notification a day.
• If yours is a site where comment threads routinely get extremely long, subscribe-to-comments is still a good thing. But you have to design alerts such that a user won’t sign up and then get 100 e-mails in the next 24 hours. Some sort of “governor” that automatically kicks into digest mode after 5 alerts are sent within 24 hours, for example, might work.