Let’s Talk About State of the Tablet

In one of our earlier blog posts, we dealt with the State of the Tablet.

It is now 2016, and it came time to cover tablets at my Columbia University class. Not many of these graduate students bring tablets to class, perhaps one third of the class. The assignment for the day was to take a look at interesting tablet editions.

Guest speaker was Joe Zeff, Vice President / Executive Creative Director, ScrollMotion, and always a favorite with my Columbia students. Joe has had a long and rich trajectory as a designer with The New York Times and TIME Magazine, among others. He was a pioneer designing for the iPad in 2010. Two of his most memorable tablet pieces are:

— Above & Beyond, with the amazing photography of George Steinmetz, was created five years ago and is still available in the iTunes store.

—TIME Magazine: 10th anniversary of 9/11 in 2011.

For me, it was an honor to have Joe come to our class and I was very eager to get his take on where the tablet stands today. While he is still a big fan of the iPad, he was hard pressed to mention one newspaper or magazine that he believes is doing a great iPad edition.

However, his job at ScrollMotion has him involved with fascinating projects for businesses around the nation, including interesting work with Apple.

“The iPad was where I wanted to be. It leveraged my ability to tell stories, to create images -- images that move -- to create graphic design, to put all those things together in a brand new way. That changed my business, and my life,” Joe said.

“The iPad is the best machine ever made for telling stories. People use their fingers to make things move, not only on the screen but inside their brains. Our audiences used to be passive, reading words on a page or watching images on a screen. Now they have the ability to interact like never before."

“As a businessman I am held accountable for the success or failure of my work. If my work doesn't yield results, I don't get rehired. This wasn't the case in newspapers, where I could design page after page without concern for whether or not my work would increase readership,” he said. “Journalists need to be more accountable for their success or failure to engage."

A question for Joe was about the reason why so many magazines failed with their iPad editions.

“There was no revenue model for tablets. Publishers blew it immediately by making everything free, giving away replicas in an attempt to rescue declining print subscriptions. Then they failed to develop an advertising model. They could have sold ads that spanned multiple titles, combining audiences to attract advertisers. Instead they kept each title separate, too small for agencies to bother."

Takeaways from my tablet lecture

—Tablets not as popular as before. They have not met publishers’ expectations.

—Tablets have matured, transforming themselves. Not so much lean back only, but used for lean forward moments too.

—Users want to be updated, the news component is extremely important.

—Tablet users want the complete experience. The knowledge that there is curation of lean back material, but aware that editors are
updating the edition.

—They come to the tablet for the short read, for the long read, to be engaged and to be entertained.

—While pop ups continue to be important: you must design for the eye, the brain and the finger, I believe we are seeing a more functional approach to what pops up.

—At the end of the day, the tablet IS the newspaper in a new platform. We come with certain expectations that go beyond those we have for print. Nonetheless, at the heart of a tablet edition is storytelling.