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Ireland's political and cultural magazine
38September/October 2015
Times tables
MEDIA
F
OR internet companies, UX is an
integral part of the product.
Done well, it’s invisible. The
interplay of icons, taps and
swiping actions on a smart-
phone screen. Point and click have been
desktop metaphors on computers since
the Macintosh introduced the
world to graphical screens. Amazon
one-click purchase is the exemplar. The
idea is simple. Attention is fleeting, so
don’t put barriers between decision and
action.
Newspapers are a user experience
from a different era. Just as the size of a
phone screen influences the design of an
app, the technologies behind print pro-
duction determined newspaper design,
from the classical ‘pyramid structure’ of
a news report to choices in font design,
layout and picture placement.
Part of the pain of ‘transitioning’
from print to digital news is the hango-
ver from many of the design decisions of
the print era. And those decisions, and
the mindset they created, can hamper
even the most forward-looking
operations.
All of which is a long-winded way of
noting that the newly launched Irish
daily digital news offering from the
Sunday Times had a few teething
problems.
UX trains users to expect certain con-
sequences. Everyone has heard
anecdotes about toddlers poking furi-
ously at television screens in glossy
magazines, wondering why they don’t
react to touch like iPads.
Adults may smile at those stories, and
perhaps draw some pithy conclusions
about how technology is changing child-
hood, but we too are conditioned. And a
prime piece of conditioning is how we
expect to deal with new apps. Pick up a
phone (or tablet), tap the iTunes store or
Google Play icon, enter the app name,
click install, and open.
Installing the new Sunday Times app
proved not to be quite so straightfor-
ward. On the tablet, two identical apps
were on offer. One contained Irish news,
one didn’t. On the smartphone, only one
app was available. It did not contain
links to Irish stories. It turns out that
the Irish app is not readily available. To
get the app, users must first fill out a
webform giving the usual data
(name,address, credit card, and for
some reason, date of birth), and then
receive an email with a link to the Irish
news app/website.
If I were a user with a single desktop
or laptop computer, then this system
would work pretty much flawlessly.
Unfortunately, I also own a smartphone
(and a tablet). That meant that my first
The
Irish Times’
app is
better than the
Times’
.
By Gerard Cunningham
My first day’s
experience of
the Times’
news app
wasn’t of a
new news
source, but of
frustration at
inability
to access a
product I had
paid for
“
Ir ish
September/October 2015 39
day’s experience of the news app wasn’t
of a new news source, but of frustration
at inability to access a product I had
paid for. There have also been reports of
users having problems registering for
the product if they tried to do so on
their phones rather than on laptop com-
puters. With half of all online news now
consumed through smartphones, one
wonders how many potential customers
abandoned the registration process.
Getting users to pay for news is
already an uphill battle. Any minor
annoyance can be enough to make many
abandon an online task.
It’s still teething, so it’s futile to judge
the news worth of the new product on
its offering in the first couple of days.
Early advertising sought to position it
firmly as an Irish product by emphasis-
ing GAA sports coverage, though the
effect is somewhat offset when the front
page at thetimes.co.uk features a menu
bar offering “News”, “Opinion”, “Busi-
ness”, “Sport” etc and, almost as an
afterthought tucked in the right-hand
corner, “Irish News”.
The Irish office in Redmond’s Hill has
assembled a good team for their launch,
poaching talent from the Examiner,
Mail, Sunday Business Post, and the
online community. But managing a daily
news operation is a very different opera-
tion to rolling out a Sunday newspaper,
so it remains to be seen whether the
team can pull it off.
Redmond’s Hill can also expect to
face stiff challenges from the other
Times. The online launch was already
delayed by several months by legal
squabbles over whether readers would
be confused by two separate Timeses,
whether the word Times could be
claimed as an exclusive trademark when
both papers have existed for over a cen-
tury, at one point featuring learned
friends arguing over how similar two
letter Ts were in the publications’
respective twitter avatars, @irishtimes
and @thetimesIE. Ultimately, High
Court judge John Hedigan decided read-
ers could tell the difference, and the
product launched on Monday Septem-
ber (though a Supreme Court appeal is
still technically possible).
Legal faceoffs notwithstanding, the
real fight will take place on screens, as
the two titles scrap it out for reader
attention and revenues. In line with
other Murdoch titles, @thetimesIE is
uncompromising. If readers want to see
the content, then they have to pay. By
contrast, @irishtimes has one of the
leakier paywalls around, allowing read-
ers free articles a week before asking
for payment. Even that restriction is
easily bypassed by using multiple
browsers or clearing the cookie cache.
Given the ease with which it can be cir-
cumvented, it comes as no surprise that
early figures show a very modest sub-
scription uptake. The Irish Times’ paid
product feels extremely cautious, as if
it’s more about introducing readers to
the idea of paying for news than actually
charging them.
On phone screens, the two products
feel similar. Though their layout does
differ. @IrishTimes lists stories in a
single screen-wide scroll under each
category, while @thetimesIE goes for a
block layout.
Notwithstanding the initial installa-
tion hiccups with @thetimesIE, both
apps feel professional, and work well,
with quick responses to touch.
For a customer focused specifically on
Irish news, however, the early winner
feels like @irishtimes, simply on volume
grounds. While @thetimesIE clearly has
ambitions, and will no doubt engage
both new staff and freelance contribu-
tion in the coming weeks as the courts
and Oireachtas get back to business
after the Summer break, Tara Street has
long been dedicated to producing Irish
daily content and has staff dedicated to
that task, and it shows.
On top of that, the Irish Times seems
to be the only Irish news outlet truly
exploiting the possibilities of podcast-
ing with original content.
Even the national broadcaster, which
produces audio for broadcast, is content
simply to recycle its broadcasts online.
With only a limited amount of broadcast
hours, interviews and segments often
get dropped due to time pressures.
Meanwhile, politicians have become
adept at saying nothing, running down
the clock until the interview they know
will end on the hour or half hour as the
station goes to news headlines, or
weather and traffic, or the Angelus.
One example recently of where pod-
casting could supplement radio was the
‘This Week’ broadcast on Sunday Sep-
tember. Just before the broadcast,
human rights academic Vicky Conway
tweeted that her interview on the Fen-
nelly report was being bounced in
favour of an interview with Alan Shat-
ter. But while air broadcast minutes are
a finite resource, there is no such limit
in podcasting, and no reason why the
interview could not have been placed
online the same afternoon. Instead, it
disappeared into the void, though it of
course may be broadcast at a later date.
Podcasts also offer a new way to inter-
rogate subjects, as the format does not
allow for running down the clocks in the
way broadcast news does. On more than
one occasion, Podcaster Hugh Linehan
has listened patiently as a politician has
waffled on, until eventually the inter-
viewee runs out of anything to say. The
question can then be repeated a second,
or even a third time. And while the same
repeated question technique can be
used in live radio, the ticking clock
means the interviewer has to repeatedly
interrupt the waffler to do so. This can
make for great radio with an evasive
subject, but usually produces more heat
than light.
As is often the case then, the most
interesting new media are not being
created by broadcasters or newspapers,
but at points like podcasting where they
overlap. •
Murdoch’s @
thetimesIE is
uncompromis-
ing. If readers
want to see
the content,
then they
have to pay.
By contrast,
@irishtimes
has one of the
leakier pay-
walls around
“
Ir ish
