5 innovations for successful digital magazines
Things I’ve learnt in making better publishing products through innovation and user focused design.
It’s now over two years since the launch of Apple Newsstand, four since the introduction of the iPad itself — and many publishers are still wondering when the digital magazine revolution will really arrive. Profits, user numbers and advertising — for the most part — are showing slow growth and in some cases stagnation. It’s been fascinating watching publishing brands move into these new developing markets and try to work out what a digital magazine should be — almost as if it had a right to exist and a ready made audience waiting for it. Publishing brands are now suddenly existing in a world of app stores, on demand media and user centric content and design — often having to adopt waterfall editorial into iterative user requirements. Last year I spoke to Andy Budd, CEO of Clearleft, about the new competitive (often alien) environments publishing brands are increasingly finding themselves in. Andy’s team has produced some innovative publishing experiences with projects like The Week and EVO, where market and user research were central to their processes. I asked Andy to summarise his views on the future of digital magazines and where they need to evolve to:
“I think most magazine publishers incorrectly feel that they are only competing against other magazines. So they take their lead from what the industry is doing, and iterate very slowly. However the truth is that the publishing world is not only competing against each other, but every content provider on the web. This includes numerous web start-ups that have developed deep digital capabilities and a dedicated team to back them up. So rather than pushing out an update every few years, these teams are working to improve their digital publications every day day-in, day out.”
What I understand this to mean in my experience is that your competitor is no longer your newsstand nemesis with a similar market demographic — your competitor is now Netflix. Google. Facebook. Twitter. Amazon. Buzzfeed. Upworthy. And, yes, Medium.
I’ve since been asked to contribute and develop workshops for several clients who are starting to consider their products beyond the inevitable page based PDF, PNG and JPEG interactive direct / indirect replicas, and looking at user focused, relevant and responsive products — and this is the key thing — that are still associated with their existing print brand. There is the opportunity for print brands to increase their ecosystem, grow brand engagement and develop new revenue streams. However, it’s a complex process — one with many unknown unknowns — but I’ve collated an initial 5 things which I think most magazine brands can focus on in developing competitive digital brands.
Share or Die.
Users should be able to share whatever they want with whoever they want.
We can no longer restrict peoples use of our content, nor control how it is shared, aggregated or amended. To do so is arrogant and defensive.
As an industry, Publishing is inherently conservative. We need to change that and develop publishing into an open, sharing, collaborative and ideas generated industry that welcomes new disciplines and work processes. We desperately need to share skills, technology and data — and on a global level. Let’s look to the UX and development industries; talk about our processes and problems, create new ways of working, experiment with new products and be transparent about their success or failure.
Sharing skills means we don’t have to be limited by software and existing legacy skill sets. We should only be limited by the ideas we can generate, or the business models we can adopt and adapt. Limiting business models and innovation based on the search abilities of Apple Newsstand or the software roadmap of Adobe Creative Cloud is absolute madness.
“Value must be greater than pain”
If there is one definition of User Experience that wholly relates to publishing, I think it’s this quote by Scott Jensen. For the most part, digital magazines are bloated, harder to read their print counterparts and inevitably hide much of their content behind overly complex scroll boxes, buttons and in-app purchases.
Content must be available, in the format the user wants it — when they want it — and this content needs to be discoverable. This means open source formats (such as HTML, .mpeg, etc), sharing via established social media streams, bookmarking by established third party and native reader apps, resizable text size and tagged content. It means open source APIs allowing communities to access branded content. It means — more importantly — no more hero devices. The device is, and always will be, secondary to the user.
Make great experiences that don’t revolve around print based legacies. The device screen has no aesthetic, unlike the printed page and doesn’t need to be limited by flat hierarchy, linear navigation and tables of content. The page has lost it’s meaning when we consider the new tools at our disposal — accelerometer, camera, GPS receiver, mapping software, partner apps, APIs, iBeacon, geofencing — the space we have to innovate in is incredible, well documented and easily accessible.
Design for the user — not the device or Designing the ‘product of one’.
There maybe no hero device, but this doesn’t mean that an agnostic ‘publish everywhere’ (or COPE) strategy is always the answer. While this solves the problem of an increasingly large device ecosystem, it does not solve the problem of an increasingly complex, diverse and demanding user group. We need to build experiences for users and the various scenarios our users experience when using our products. This is sometimes as simple as realising that what works on tablet might not work on mobile and asking, “does anyone want to read a 10,000 word article on their mobile?”, or ,“Is there a better way of presenting this content to a mobile audience?”. This extends to creating personal experiences for individual users — is the content relevant to them individually? Are they consuming it? How are they consuming it?Designing personal experiences is what keeps bringing people back to your brand (just as Netflix and Amazon have proven with their user-aware recommendation algorithms).
As we look to removing devices from our strategies and begin focusing on users, then the single user - our products begin to be defined more and more by the individual. As the product begins to have unique relevance to the individual, the product becomes harder to define — it becomes the ‘product of one’. A single product with a unique meaning only understood by me.
We need to invest in brand experiences as the product ecosystem becomes more diluted, especially as we move towards a non-touch future. In touch products we know how interactions are defined, but in a non-touch future, who will define how users interact with your brands? It’s more likely to be the individual.
“As a designer, if you want your ego destroyed, have someone use your app and record their experience” (Alan Branch)
Yes we need to collaborate as an industry, but we need to collaborate with our users too. We can no longer produce dictatorial products — we need to be more open to user / brand two-way interaction. This includes editorial commenting, but it also includes live testing of products and ideas. By adopting Lean UX principles, we need to become more agile and in touch with our end users — create quick, inexpensive Minimal Viable Products and release them. Release a lot of them and watch how they are received and how they are used. We need to ask questions. Watch people use our products in real life - and in laboratory conditions. Improve them. Re-release them. Kill some of them and start all over again.
Most importantly of all — we need to be humbled. Ideally on a regular basis. Publishing has always been hierarchical and editor driven — this doesn’t cut it anymore. The democratisation of content is well underway, and it’s to be celebrated — it allows us to create great products and experiences with an increasingly media-literate audience willing to pay for something unique.
In conclusion — if you’re not testing, you’re just guessing.
Don’t make me look for my stuff.
Search is hard work and requires the user to know what they are looking for. Effectively, if you don’t know what you want to look for, the Google search page is probably the most useless URL anyone can access. Great content experiences should combine ease of use (“value must be greater than pain”) and content that is relevant to me and me alone (creating the product of one). Replace the ability to search with relevant content a user actually wants to interact with. To do this well, we need to know our user and learn from their discoveries. Let them browse and let them tell us what they want — then let’s place that learning inside a unique-to-them brand experience.
To achieve these things, to change how we see our users and how we develop our brands, I refer back to the principle of transparency and sharing. This isn’t a definitive list of how to create great brand experiences in publishing, but I’m hoping the beginning of a conversation beyond the limitations of software contracts, existing skills, and traditional thinking.
Let’s start talking — then start creating.
