Meaningful mobile news

Tags: Design,  Mobile applications,  Review
January 19, 2006 by Barbara

Most mobile news offerings are web sites or applications that display the same old news, merely repackaged. Unfortunately the same old news is available on television, on the radio, in newspapers, in podcasts, and on full-sized computers. In many ways, reading news on small screens is the least efficient of all these delivery methods.

There has to be a reason to go through the hassle of reading on the small screen. One could be boredom or fitting productivity in otherwise unproductive time. Another is that the news is extremely relevant to the user. And that's where the magic of RSS feeds come in.

An increasing number of blogs and news sources provide these feeds for reading content away from the standard site. This gives the user significant control over presentation of information as well as the ability to select exactly the information desired and have it delivered to a single location. It also enables reading content that is only available on a full-sized computer elsewhere.

For a mobile RSS reader, I've been using Quick News for the Palm, by Stand Alone Inc. The software is very buggy on my LifeDrive, which several issues that make me unwilling to pay money for the software. However, the experience has been interesting and has exposed some key design issues.

RSS feed discovery is the first challenge. This is something I prefer to do on my full-sized computer. I recently saw an estimate of 20 million active blogs world wide; finding the right ones is difficult. A mere list of blogs and feeds would be insufficient. Quick News has an importing mechanism for users willing to learn what "OPML" is and with a desktop tool that generates it.

Quick News allows the categorization of news feeds, which was very nice for prioritizing my time. Unfortunately I then wanted to read all articles in the category in a single list, as the category was my industry news list. I believe this is a critical feature for mobile access, and the Safari built-in RSS reader has this feature.

I found myself using a split screen version of the reader, with 4 lines of titles at the top, and the balance of the screen devoted to the actual article. If I had a smaller screen, I would have stuck with single-article display. Of course, the worst part of the Quick News design implementation was the lack of a "Read More ..." link allowing me to see the rest of the article.

This is also one place where a list item should not scroll. I need to be able to scan the post title quickly to understand the context of the post. The information, "the telecom maker is rated a strong buy" might be the entirety of the text - if I don't know which telecom maker it is, the information is meaningless. With Quick News, I to wait 15 seconds for the entirety of the title to scroll.

When I read an article & it is marked as read, re-updating should not make the article become "unread" or "new". This is extremely important to my experience.

Finally, while Quick News allows me to flag an article, I found this insufficient. I would like to save important stories to computer via (a) bookmark list, (b) email, © desktop file, (d) to do list, or (e) stickies. If I am going to do anything important with the information, like further research or forwarding the article, I am very likely to do that on my main workstation.


«« Fitt’s Law for mobile devices  |  Rollable Displays »»

1 Comment

  1. […] « Rollable Displays RSS Redeux My recent post about meaningful news has got me looking at news options on both my mobile d […]

    Pingback by Little Springs Design - Weblog » Blog Archive » RSS Redeux — February 2, 2006 @ 12:54 pm

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI

Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.