I’m done with Yahoo! News Digest

Pardon the play on words in the title. I’m actually quite impressed with the Yahoo! News Digest. It’s slick and well-designed. I figured out how to navigate the app in under 20 seconds on my first visit. And the idea of curating “atoms” of news is the next big thing in the news industry.

Yahoo! News Digest is the first product built upon Summly, a startup created by 17-year-old Nick D’Aloisio and later acquired by Yahoo! (Author’s note: at his age, I was a pretty awesome book seller at Barnes & Noble. But who’s competing?)

When watching Nick demo the app, I was impressed. Until he got to the DONE screen. The digest — published once in the morning and once in the evening — has 9 stories per edition. Once you’ve read all 9, you get a screen that says “DONE”.

“You get this moment of completion,” D’Aloisio said.

Immediately, my Spidey sense tingled, and something felt awry. Why would Yahoo! choose such a finite ending to the product? So many product strategies are built upon the hypothesis that “the page view is dead” and that engagement/time spent is where the future lies. (Even Medium focuses on Total Time Spent as a key metric.)

Yes, there’s a moment of completion and there’s a reward for finishing, but where is the organic user experience of discovery? This is news. Shouldn’t I be able to continue browsing and learning? Shouldn’t Yahoo! be promoting additional engagement within the app? As a user, I got to the Done screen and said to myself, “Well, that’s it, there’s nowhere else I can explore in the app.”

But then I realized the DONE screen actually works for this app. The information IS finite. It’s basically a newspaper that comes out twice a day. When I get to the last page of the newspaper, I’m done, and there’s nothing to do until the next edition comes out. Yahoo! News Digest isn’t trying to be Circa or other mobile news apps that focuses on breaking news or lets you follow developments of stories you’re interested in. It’s not giving you endless streams of content. It’s giving you a carefully curated magazine of the information that you need to know. And to their credit, you can move beyond the DONE screen. There’s a “Did you know” factoid, the ability to browse previous issues, and some “more reading” if you keep scrolling.

So the lesson here? Don’t worry about what the trends are for other products. Stake your claim on your own specific value proposition and then deliver the best user experience and content possible.