Thursday, May 10, 2012

Tablet editions: Leveraging tap, swipe and scroll

emedia/vitals reporting:
Publishers continue to experiment with ways to turn touch-screen functionality into a better user experience for their tablet editions. By my account, they're making good progress.
I spent the last couple of weeks immersed in 10 consumer magazines running on a Kindle Fire tablet: eight Condé Nast titles (Condé Nast Traveler, Glamour, Golf Digest, GQ, Self, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair and Wired), Time Inc.'s Sports Illustrated, and Reader's Digest. The Condé titles and Reader's Digest were developed with Adobe's Digital Publishing Suite. (Disclosure: Adobe provided the Kindle as a loaner to review these publications.) The Sports Illustrated app was created by Time Inc. and the Wonderfactory.
Adobe has been aggressively positioning its Digital Publishing Suite (DPS) as a seamless and sophisticated platform for print publishers looking to produce high-quality digital editions. Earlier this month, the company announced that more than 16 million DPS-based digital publications had been downloaded over the past year.
As a whole, the magazines I reviewed speak well to the progress publishers have made in the tablet space in a relatively short amount of time. Here's an overview of the functionality that's defining a new generation of digital publications. 
Navigation
Condé has taken a more-is-more approach to navigation with its digital publications. Any given page offers a choice of vertical swiping/ scrolling (to page through an article) and lateral swiping (to advance to the next editorial asset or ad). That's in addition to the multiple navigation options accessible by tapping on the page, including a back button, a horizontal "scrubber" bar on the bottom of each page, a top horizontal "browser" index on the top of each page, and a drop-down TOC. Phew!...
http://www.emediavitals.com/content/tablet-editions-leveraging-tap-swipe-and-scroll?utm_source=Vital+Guide+to+eMedia&utm_campaign=2173104c7d-EMV_VG_Tablet_App_Strategies5_10_2012&utm_medium=email

No comments:

Post a Comment