
Why WSJ Mobile App Gets 2 Star Customer Reviews - joshuacc
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/mobile-startup-screen.html
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cageyjames
See that isn't quite right, while the app is free to subscribers to the
physical newspaper, those of us who use the online web access don't get access
to the iPhone, only the iPad. That's why I'm unhappy. Dudes mockups still
leave us online users pissed.

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ryandashjones
Thank you! Someone is paying attention.

This article makes it look like it's free to online subscribers (if you can
figure it out).

But that's not the case at all. It is NOT free to online subscribers.
Therefore it's got bad design, cryptic pricing, and the are double charging.
All of which warrant two star reviews.

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sc68cal
A cynical person might say that the design was intentional, to vacuum up a few
extra subscription fees. Especially when the actual login button is shoved all
the way at the bottom of the screen and significantly smaller (due to a lack
of a background shape) than the other two buttons. Buttons don't shrink on
their own accord, especially when it comes to interface design. Whoever wrote
the app had to have the stakeholders sit down and give input on the look and
feel - I doubt they'd miss something like that.

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aresant
Nielsen concludes “Ideally, the next step is to user test the redesign. You
can do this with paper prototyping, so you don't have to fully implement a new
app . . .”

Rather than that, it's actually quite easy (and overlooked IMO) to implement a
meaningful A/B framework within iOS by setting up your experiments as live web
pages that the app accesses.

The key reason NOT to do this is latency, so make sure you're on the fastest
box possible and consider pre-caching the experiment images via SDWebImage or
similar.

In our experience any loss you have around latency will be made up in spades
by having an engine that lets you test your funnel in a real world
environment.

ref for image pre-loading -

<https://github.com/rs/SDWebImage>

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4617424/improve-
uitablevi...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4617424/improve-uitableview-
scrolling-performance-while-loading-images)

[http://www.iphonedevsdk.com/forum/iphone-sdk-
tutorials/13315...](http://www.iphonedevsdk.com/forum/iphone-sdk-
tutorials/13315-image-caching-tutorial.html)

~~~
joshuacc
Does this rely on having internet access available on the iDevice? Or could
you bundle default screens in your app, which only update if internet access
is available?

~~~
rawsyntax
yes, you can cache pages locally, and update when internet access is available

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dimmuborgir
These usability stories make me laugh.

Anyone else thinks <http://useit.com> homepage is almost unusable?

~~~
asolove
Did you read it? This isn't a "your site isn't usable to the 1% of users with
motor disabilities" Nielsen article.

WSJ spent money to create an app that, because of one poor piece of text, made
existing, paying customers dislike them.

And not for a real reason, like charging them twice, but a misunderstanding
caused by bad copy and never testing the app with real subscribers.

~~~
dimmuborgir
First, how Nielsen came to conclusion that the reason for the app's bad rating
is its startup screen design is beyond me. Read the comment of _cageyjames_.
That could be the reason.

Second, usability isn't a science. So it's vulnerable to criticisms.

~~~
Silhouette
> Second, usability isn't a science.

You seem to be using a different definition of "usability" to most of us
throughout this discussion. To people like Nielsen (who certainly popularised
and arguably originated the term) usability _is_ like a science: it is about
measuring how people behave in practice and improving your product in light of
that hard data. Once may draw inferences from that data, if patterns start to
emerge where some practices are on balance superior to others, but just as in
science, such inferences are falsifiable and only as good as the latest data
set.

It is more than a little ironic that useit.com itself has become less usable
over time, according to many of the very factors that Nielsen himself has
commented on in the past...

