If you’re reading content, you want to bookmark that content because you want to get back to it. You want to be able to create notes around it because you want to remember what your thought was when you were reading it. You want to be able to share this stuff with other people. There are things that you want to do with content that are aside from whether or not it slides on or off the page. Once it does that you’re still faced with having to read it. So we were like, ‘Lets get to the reading part.’
BE has this valuable content. It’s a great magazine. So how do we create an app that makes people feel like they want to read the magazine? That was our question and that was our goal.
Regardless of how you attempt to navigate through this app, getting to the information you want seems incredibly intuitive. What, if any, steps were taken to account for all of the possible user scenarios?
I opened up the magazine and went to the table of contents, and I said to myself, ‘What does this TOC tell me about the magazine?’ or ‘What can I expect to read in the magazine?’ From a very physical standpoint, it allowed me to know where the content I wanted to access was, and that’s what the whole app is designed to do–to provide you with the content that you want to get to as quickly as you can get to it.
There are a number of ways you can get to that content, because nobody does it the same way. So we tried to incorporate at least three main ways to get the content to speak to different people’s preferences. So you have the color bar and you can access the content by sections. BE does a really good job of sectioning their content, so we wanted to do that. We wanted to do a browser, but my idea of what content is is more than just the article or just the pages. Particularly on a device like the iPad, which provides you the ability to have content that wasn’t included in the print version of the magazine. So how do you access that content as well? You can do it by going to the page and finding the related content–but there ought to be a way in the browsing functionality to deconstruct and get to all of that content.
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