Ali Sharif is an industry veteran with more than 20 years experience as a communications/interactive professional. He has made vital contributions to everyone from AT&T and Mos Def to The New York Times. He has also racked up his fair share of awards throughout these years, including a few from The Society of Newspaper Design.
Soon after the iPad debuted, Sharif and longtime friend Ed Young formed F2F 6Sixty Digital, a joint venture that combined the resources of both their companies. The new entity would give them the resources and connections they needed to bring a quality app to market.
On the eve of the BE app’s launch on Thursday, August 19, Sharif took the time to explain how everything came together, and what he and the F2F 6Sixty team set out to accomplish with this app.
How did the F2F660 relationship with BE begin?
F2F was already doing a circulation piece for Black Enterprise–a subscription module that allows magazine publishers to offer the lowest price to their subscribers when it’s time for them to re-up. And it allows them to pass on savings to their friends once they’ve bought the magazine. So they were already dealing with Black Enterprise on that.
Ed and I had been friends for a bit and were trying to figure out what to do in the iPad realm. So it seemed like the perfect opportunity to approach BE about the iPad since we were already talking to them about the F2F stuff.
What were you looking to accomplish with this app? What was your goal?
As I started downloading magazine apps, one of the things that frustrated me was trying to read the magazine. I was inundated by all this animation and I was like ‘I just want to read the damn magazine!’ I’m not so interested in the title sliding in or funky ways to separate the text from the graphics–I want to read the magazine. So for us, it was about finding a publisher or title that had content that was worth reading, and that was really how we decided to go to Black Enterprise, because they had good content.
If you have good content, and if it’s a business magazine like Black Enterprise is, then their demographic isn’t the demo for all the fancy graphic animation. You can do some of them, but they want to read the content. It’s vital, important, valuable content. So how do we create an app that really facilitates reading the content?
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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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When you look at a lot of these magazine apps, they have this content panel where you can slide through pages, but I was unsatisfied with that approach because all I could get to were the pages. I wanted to get to the videos, I wanted to get to the photos, I wanted to get to my bookmarks. I wanted to get to the ads separately.
So my vision was ‘How do you create a deconstructed view of all the content?’ and that’s how you get to our two browsers. There’s the one browser where you can thumb through the different levels of content, but then there’s the browser where you really see a deconstructed magazine–from the pages down to the ads and your bookmarks. You can get to exactly what you want to get to with one tap.
The Reader Accounts are an amazing concept, possibly providing subscription-like info when Apple has yet to allow for a subscription model that satisfies all publishers. What was the genesis of this idea?
This is an interesting story. My wife, when she reads magazines, leaves them on the kitchen counter at the end of the night. I get up around 4:00 a.m. because I can’t sleep and I get a bowl of cereal every night. So I’m stuck with either reading the back of the cereal boxes or reading the magazines she left on the counter. So I read the magazines. And what I realized was that she’s got a bunch of pages bookmarked; she’s got a bunch of notes on pages. And if I find something in the magazine that I’m interested in, I’m almost afraid to bookmark that page because it messes with what she’s already done to the magazine.
Magazines, when they come into the household, are generally shared by the people in the household. Back in the days when you had Ebony and Jet on every black coffee table in America, the whole family read the magazine. So that’s what we tried to facilitate–a sharing of the magazine and a sharing of the iPad. Apple’s got this whole idea that they really want [the iPad] to be a family device. So how do you do that? There are no accounts on the iPad. If you have an Apple computer, you can log in and create an account, but you can’t create an account on the iPad itself.
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So we said ‘Let’s create accounts inside the magazine.’ That way, multiple people in the household can read the magazine and not have to worry about disturbing what was left by the previous reader.
That definitely improves the experience for readers, but how did you envision the Reader Accounts creating value for advertisers?
If you’re really looking at how to market these things correctly and bring some sort of profitability or revenue to them, it’s really got to be done through some kind of advertising or sponsorship. But if you have a device that’s in the house and it’s being shared, it’s not an effective targeting of the people who are reading the content. You can have three people reading the same magazine, but you won’t know who is interested in which particular articles or which particular products. But when you’ve got these reader accounts, you can more clearly target and create demographic profiles with specific people who read the magazine. They’re going to be anonymous so you’re not going to know who is who, but you’ll certainly be able to say ‘This reader really got into the Shopsmart articles.’ And when that reader account pops up, you can target information to them that is based on what they were interested in reading, and you can target advertising to them based on what their affinities are.
So it was the idea of being able to share the magazine within a household, but then also to be able to create these demographic profiles within a household for better targeting of content and better targeting of advertising.
BE has never had an app for any platform and this is your first time producing one. How long was the entire process, from concept to creation?
It was about a 45- to 50-day build–that was from conception. So we had to design the entire app interface in two weeks, which was every single interface screen and how it worked. In two weeks. That was a monumental task. Then Terence and his team had to turn around pages, in both orientations, very shortly thereafter. Then we had a really, really rapid build cycle. It was nuts!