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The Pew Research Center recently reported that half of tablet owners (53%) read news on their tablets each day. They also use email (54%), engage in social networking (39%), gaming (30%), reading books (17%) and watching movies and videos (13%). The most frequent activity is browsing the web (67%).
Being a late adopter, I just got my iPad a few months ago, but I use it so much that I have to recharge it every night.
I don't work, such as writing blog posts, on my iPad, but I do keep up with the news, email, and topics I'm interested in curating.
I get many communications from nonprofits that I support or follow, especially email newsletters. I do find it pretty easy to read a newsletter on my iPad if it is embedded within an email and formatted in a linear way. My favorite email newsletters are from Best Friends, an animal sanctuary.
Here is an example of one of the newsletters from Best Friends that you can read in your browser. I could go on at great length about the virtues of the newsletters from Best Friends, but I'll keep that for another post.
What startled me is that I recently received an email from Direct Relief International, that required me to click a link (frankly, a lot of people won't do this) which then opened the newsletter in my iPad browser. I found that the newsletter was published in a magazine format. Here is that link. Try it on your tablet and then on your computer. There are problems either way, but different ones.
Magazine and newspaper apps for tablets vary widely in their usability and navigational tools. Sometimes you swipe horizontally to turn the pages and sometimes you swipe vertically. In some apps, there are tiny section icons that you have to use to move around.
When viewed in the iPad browser, this particular newsletter seems to be impervious to enlarging, whether by the usual finger gestures used on tablets or by clicking on a headline, or anything else that I could find. You swipe to flip the pages, but the application seems to be fixed in size and there is no zoom. The newsletter is quite colorful with a creative design. I'd love to read it, but the text is too small.
Now, I am not a youngster. I wear bifocal glasses for instance. But then I'm pretty typical of nonprofit supporters. I'm also not ahead of my bifocal peers in owning an iPad or other tablet. The day I went to the Apple store to buy my iPad, I was surprised to see that most of the customers were older. It was a sea of gray-haired people in bifocals. And they were all pretty excited about their new toy.
The Pew report on the "Tablet Revolution" shows that 32% of tablet users are 50-plus. I know that nonprofits have been shaping up their communications for mobile phones, but they need to pay attention to how they appear on tablets as well. There is only so much that one can do to enlarge text before it becomes too much of a hassle to continue.
A Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox reported on tablet usability recently and noted several frequent problems, such as squeezing too much information into a small area or having too much navigation, resulting in confusion. When I viewed the Direct Relief International newsletter on my computer screen, too much navigation became the problem. Too many navigational tools, tiny icons at the bottom of the screen and a scrolling thumbnail section caused me to give up pretty quickly.
Take a look at the newsletter from Best Friends and the magazine style newsletter from Direct Relief International on a tablet and see what you think. Ironically, the first screen for the Direct Relief International newsletter is an image of a tablet. The organization apparently expected a lot of readers to view it on a tablet. Unfortunately, I did not persevere in reading all that wonderful content from Direct Relief International on my iPad, or on my computer.
For me, and I suspect a lot of readers, a newsletter in a linear format with links off to articles at a website, is much easier to read and navigate than a newsletter in a magazine format. Best Friends does send frequent newsletters, and that allows for a reasonable amount of content per issue. The Direct Relief International looks like a quarterly newsletter since it is labeled "Fall 2011 Newsletter." It really is a 7-page brochure and perhaps should be labeled something besides a newsletter.
For more on newsletter design, I suggest this article from Smashing Magazine. That article cites an Email Newsletter Usability study from Nielsen Norman Group.
What do you think? How are you preparing for the tablet revolution? Share your ideas and solutions in the comments.
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