Forcing a user to load an app to view most content is a bad experience.
As regular readers of this space know, we here at CA Technologies offer CA Application Performance Management (CA APM), a tool that is designed to help IT organizations assure customers are getting a great user experience from its Web applications. While the metrics we deliver in CA APM can tell you if something is not working properly from a performance perspective, it cannot tell you that your chosen user interface is annoying to users.
Here’s my rant what I mean: Facebook has made it very frictionless (its term) to share what you’re reading or doing on the site or wider Web in general. One company taking advantage of that is The Washington Post. At least it is to a certain extent. I see friends reading articles and sharing them via Facebook all the time. The problem is, when I find one interesting and go to read it, I get asked to load a special application first. Why can’t I just read the content first and decide if want an application later for a better experience?
This forced-app download issue also seems to have struck Christopher Mims from Technology Review the wrong way as well. As he shares in his Mims’s Bits blog, he recently tried to watch a 60 Minutes segment sent to him by a friend on his iPad. But when he clicked the link sent to him, he was redirected to the Apple AppStore to first download the 60 Minutes App with no alternative to see a text version of the piece or do anything else really.
Why do so many Web developers think that tablets are an excuse to break the functionality of the Web? Anyone who does this, even if it’s just an interstitial ad for a tablet app, should be forced to put the following disclaimer at the top of their tablet-detecting sites:
ATTENTION USER: We know you were enjoying the frictionless access to content that is the implicit promise of a hyperlink, but we would rather you bounce off the outer berm of our walled garden, because ad rates are higher on our tablet apps or something? All we know is, somebody on the 13th floor needs to show steady growth in “engagement” on “post-PC” devices.
I love a great Facebook or iPad app (have you tried W.E.L.D.E.R.?) as much as the next guy, but Web developers should let me make the decision to download and install an app by giving me a taste of the content within and telling me how much better the experience would be if I tried the app. Don’t force me to load the app to see any of the content at all or, like Mims, I’ll be going elsewhere for my news and entertainment.
While the odds are against me that our engineers will accept my suggestion to add a “your-interface-is-annoying-users-o-meter” into CA APM, Web developers can and should take a step back to look at how their content is being viewed and think: “Is this how users want to consume our content?”
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