The Daily review

'The Daily' iPad app came out this week. I was looking forward to it after reading a lot of speculation and expectations for months about it.

The app design and usability feels like something trying to be everything to everyone who got to throw their design ideas into this app.  In any software product, just because you can do something flashy doesn't mean you should.

Some examples...

- The use of little blue right arrows on the bottom right corners of some article pages is misleading... your eye is drawn to them thinking you can click on them, but nothing happens when they do.  They appear to be part of the design layout but serve no functional purpose. Don't create visual graphics that look like common navigational or UI controls. Users will try to click on them.

- There's thin very light colored hairlines at 45 degree angles on some pages that only distract the user.  Is that a hair on my iPad?

- Some pictures can be clicked on to zoom in on them, whole others don't do anything when you click on them -- with no visual cues to the difference.

- While reading an article, some display a more/related link to another article in the bottom right... clicking on it takes you to the related article, but you can't get back to the article or section you were reading when you followed that link.  You have to navigate from the table of contents back down to find your place again.

Bottom line for me is the app is too noisy.  Too much UI visually distracting from the important stuff, the content.  When anyone picks up a magazine or newspaper to read, they don't have to figure out how to open it, find articles, read it. They intuitively turn the pages, read or flip through it easily. Using the Daily is like just wanting to read today's news but you have to find your way through the Library of Congress first.

Despite an interesting array of UI ideas, 'The Daily' is a difficult to navigate media closet with vertical and horizontal shelves of content scattered all over the place. 

I don't care how powerful or snazzy some UI is, if it's not intuitive and easy to use the first time and every time, it's just noise.