If you are weighing up the possibility of developing an iPad-only magazine, here’s some food for thought.

Native platform offers many advantages over traditional hypertext delivery. To consider a few:

Technical Advantages

• Gyroscope and Accelerometer.
• File system access (address book, photos).
• Fully-immersive experience (e.g. gaming).
• Support for in-app purchases.
• Camera.
• Offline support.
• Smoother and much more responsive graphics.

Promotional Advantages

• There is much less competition on iTunes than there is on the web.
• App discovery is possibly better, if you compare the old school SEO vs. hand full of categories on the App Store.
• Push notifications.

Higher Expectations

• App Store quality expectations are very high. Most of the websites wouldn’t stand a chance as an app - customer reviews would bury them.
• Most leading publishers offer apps, but mostly they are low quality. Mashable, AllthingsD, Metro UK, to name a few, distribute native applications that have inferior quality to their web counterparts. Considering how many apps are used only once and then deleted, it’s a really narrow window to enchant your customer.

I wrote earlier that findability is possibly better on the App Store than it is on the web when you consider competing volumes, but if you try searching the Newstand App you will quickly realise that discoverability is one of it’s weaknesses, not strengths. Also, if you consider how many of your frequently used apps were discovered using iTunes, and how many of them came from a review or a recommendation, the “promotional” advantages might not be advantages at all.

So it all comes down to this question - what content (other than text, pictures and video) will require any of the ‘technical’ advantages of the native platform over the browser delivery?

Even if the answer is none, I’m sure there are some publishers out there who will want to differentiate by User Experience so they will dive deep into Objective-C just for text & pics.

So, is the UX going to be a true differentiator for you?

There is none. The only option you have is to do amazing work, because nothing else makes a difference (or if it does, it doesn’t scale).

Greg McKeown, writing for Harvard Business Review, in his article The Disciplined Pursuit of Less:

Why don’t successful people and organizations automatically become very successful? One important explanation is due to what I call “the clarity paradox,” which can be summed up in four predictable phases:

• Phase 1: When we really have clarity of purpose, it leads to success.
• Phase 2: When we have success, it leads to more options and opportunities.
• Phase 3: When we have increased options and opportunities, it leads to diffused efforts.
• Phase 4: Diffused efforts undermine the very clarity that led to our success in the first place.

Curiously, and overstating the point in order to make it, success is a catalyst for failure.

And Horace Dediu, in his recent article Think Small:

Understanding the “fundamentals” of a product is far more important than having lots of products for the sake of diversification alone.

The fundamentals of a product are knowing its job to be done and thus its requirements which, when well executed, will position it precisely and unambiguously on an opportunity.

“Users’ attention is a rare and precious commodity.”

Technology is a brilliant enabler, and it’s very easy to get over-enthusiastic with it.

I see many media owners reaching out for their to-do list every time their competitor rolls out something new without thinking about why the opposite camp had done something in the first place. Another common scenario is this - “now that we have this (module) available, let’s drop it here, here, here and there”.

Just because your Content Management System has a rich module list, it doesn’t mean you should drop them into every empty space on every page just because “it’s related”. Every time you add something, you need to be absolutely sure that you’re solving a problem, and that you’re solving it in a right way. Otherwise you are wasting your users’ time and diluting your own resources.

If an element, page or workflow doesn’t pass a rigorous “why is this here” check, it is safe to assume that it simply shouldn’t be there. If in doubt, cut.

Jared Spool has an interesting theory about market maturity cycle. Spool says that most markets start with technology, then go through features (aka checklist battles), and in the end – arrive at the experience.

Similar path applies to people who build products. If you see a designer, developer or a product manager sprinkling features here and there, you can be sure they are not quite there yet. It takes some mileage to be able to get to the bottom of things, and what usually happens is that solving, first of all, means reflecting back on the organisation itself, rather than instantly producing code or some graphics.

Thing is that many people think that more money should get them more web design. More buttons, bigger forms, longer feature lists, stacks of pages.

Jonathan Ive (senior VP of industrial design at Apple), 2 months ago:

We are really pleased with our revenues but our goal isn’t to make money. It sounds a little flippant, but it’s the truth. Our goal and what makes us excited is to make great products. If we are successful people will like them and if we are operationally competent, we will make money.

Pretty humble for the most valuable company of all time.

Leisa Reichelt in her article Why most UX is shite writes:

Companies who really care [about User Experience] shape their organisations, their accounting systems, their culture around their customers. […]

The UI is a symptom of organisational culture – you need to get beneath the skin to craft really, sustainably good UX. […]

There are no Five Simple Steps to making your UX fabulous, there is no simple fix. All of these things are hard and most of them start much higher up in the organisation than the average UX designer ever gets to. […]

Good UX is cultural.

Brilliant summary. Be sure to read the entire post.

I find that the whole notion of social makes some leaders really uneasy.

In the last decade it was acceptable to build a wall around your online presence and to divide the world into “us” and “them”. Entire premise of the internet “marketing” was designed around pushing out a broadcast and turning it into page views and unique visits. Just a one way number game, nothing to do with the needs of the real people.

Today, this is no longer an option. Pretty much everything people do today is social or is becoming social.

Social media, social gaming, social consumption, social journalism, social learning, social TV watching, discussion groups, forums, comments, fans, followers, tribes, interest groups. And although technology enabled social to such great extent, what’s happening lately is no longer a technology issue, it’s just life. People are naturally driven to other people just like them.

If you don’t pay attention to this social change, or you maybe see it, but you’re refusing to move forward, you are in danger of becoming extinct without even realising it. And because this shift is tectonic, you don’t have the power to oppose this change, neither you have a choice. No single business does.

You may think you are fine, because you’re on Twitter or you have a have a Facebook page. Thing is, if you don’t engage in a conversation, start a movement, lead or join a tribe, you are simply confusing social with your RSS feed.

The biggest “problem” with social, is that it makes you vulnerable, exposed, demystified and without control. Social enforces transparency, enables immediate feedback and leaves you with absolutely nowhere to hide.

And I suppose that’s true, but only if you or your service is mediocre. The thing is that your only alternative is to be amazing. Just imagine - nothing else can impact this, but doing an amazing work.

The bottom line is that if you’re scared of social, my guess is that it’s because of the mediocrity of your work or product.

A while ago I read Tonny Maning’s brilliant Making Sense of Strategy, and some of his insights came back to me last night when talking about the importance of having a continuous strategic conversation within an organisation.

Without further ado, Tonny Manning on planning:

Many companies treat strategic planning as an annual rain dance, but wonderful plans don’t necessarily bring rain. Usually, they turn to dust.

On having a “fingertip feel” for what’s going on inside your business:

Meaningful strategic conversation requires rigorous probing into what your organization does, why, and how. But that doesn’t mean it’s exclusively a matter for top managers. The fact that they hog it in so many companies is precisely why it so often comes to nothing.

On the importance of frequent communication:

Choices, commitment, and capacity are not the products of machines. All result from people talking to each other. All come from that everyday activity – conversation – that we mostly take for granted and often use carelessly because it’s such an integral part of our lives.

If you’re not engaged in a constant conversation about what lies ahead, what it means, and what you should do about it, the world will pass you by.

But here is the key quote:

When people don’t talk about the right things – and don’t talk about them constantly, creatively, and constructively – things quickly come unglued. Parts of the organization come adrift and resources are sprayed in different directions. On the other hand, when people are informed, involved, and encouraged to speak their minds, miracles happen. Synthesis is most likely when people meet and talk face to face. So you should do everything possible to make this happen – and to make it easy.

If you liked these quotes, be sure to check out the book.

Hamish McKenzie, writing for PandoDaily, has some interesting thoughts on tablet-only magazines:

Lest you think this is just a paper problem, keep a close eye on what’s happening with tablet-only magazines. If publishers thought tablets were going to be the saviors of their industry, they must be really bummed out by recent news that The Daily is cutting a third of its staff and the Huffington Post has decided to stop charging for its iPad magazine after just five issues. Working on the principle that three events equal a trend and two pass for a story, AdWeek last week asked “Are Tablet-Only Publications Dead?”.

But I really like McKenzie’s conclusion:

But the game isn’t over for journalists and editors – it’ll just be leaner and different. They will have to produce content that can move easily outside the borders of pages and apps, content that can be shared – even purchased – at the click of a button, content that can live on the strength of its reporting and writing.

Via Daring Fireball.

Jakob Nielsen has just written a blog post about SEO and Usability in which he briefly describes the relationship between the two disciplines.

I agree with Jakob, but I think it’s worth saying that building online service with user experience as your top priority will result in having solid SEO anyway. Don’t get me wrong though, I don’t think that you should forget about the SEO completely - quite the opposite actually.

Thing is that if you focus on the users from the very beginning, you’ll always have a chance to tweak or enhance the SEO later. What doesn’t work though is the reversal of this process. If you start with the SEO as your foundation, and then try “adding” usability on top of it, you’ll end up with a product that doesn’t serve either purpose.

If you think about it, building a user focused service means getting a number of things right. Typically you should:

• Organise content so it’s easy to understand and navigate.
• Produce relevant content that reflects what readers would like to read or see.
• Design URL structure so that it’s human readable and reflects how content is organised and indicates where users currently are within the site’s structure.
• Structure HTML mark-up so that it has a small footprint, making sure that relevant HTML elements are used for their purpose - page titles, window titles, emphasis, quotes, images, paragraphs, meta tags etc.
• Create a scannable layouts using meaningful headings and subheadings, and paragraphs of appropriate length.
• Use plain, concise, marketese free language that’s easy to read and understand, and stay away from “clever” words and pun headlines.
• Help users to get to more information by using relevant broader category and outbound links.

A complete list of what makes good UX would obviously be longer than this, but the point is that these are just the things that will find in the SEO books. And the best part is that you get that part of the SEO work for free, just because you deep dive with your users’ needs.