Huffington Post just launched the second version of its news iPad app, retreating from the look and feel of the standard HuffPost website and taking design cues from the new Twitter website and iPad app.
Paul Berry, CTO of Huffington Post, describes in detail the inspiration behind HuffPost 2.0, and the results, in a blog post on Huffington Post. What’s most interesting is how much Twitter inspired his work:
It’s hard to believe how quickly the iPad has swept change. One of the biggest landmark moments for me in 2010 was the release of the new Twitter and the Twitter iPad app. It was important for a few reasons, in part because it signaled the moment when Twitter had become such a talent pool that it would, like Google and Facebook, inform the larger web design world. More importantly, for the first time, the iPad and the world of apps truly led to the redesign of websites, both in terms of visuals and user experience.
Here’s the Twitter and HuffPost 2.0 apps side by side, for comparison:
Nicknamed NewsGlide, the new Huffington Post iPad app is completely gesture-focused so that it’s really intuitive to browse through news stories from the front page. There’s a new focus on photos, too, to take advantage of the brilliant iPad screen. The front page is broken down into five basic categories–Top Stories, News, Blogs, Most Popular and Slideshows. Opening stories triggers sidebars from the right-hand side of the screen, much in the way that Twitter slides in supplemental content about tweets or users.
Initial reception of the app seems positive, according to Berry, who says usage of the app increased 1000 percent on its first day, meaning people were using the app 10 times more than before.
In spite of that, customer ratings aren’t very good for either version of the Huffington Post app. With 52 ratings, the current version garnered three stars out of a possible five. Version 1.0, had been rated over a thousand times, and garnered a two-and-a-half star rating.
Three customer reviews currently featured on the app’s iTunes page are all negative. Two argue that the app values design over content to a fault, something that could possibly be true considering how much Berry spends talking about design in his blog post. (To Berry’s credit, he’s talking about the iPad app, so there’s really no need to talk about content.) The third customer merely says he’s seeing a visual glitch across the screen.
The good news is that Berry and his team seem very open to user feedback. Berry says future iterations of the HuffPost app will focus on customizations that will enable users to choose the color of the app’s background or switch to a more text-oriented app, like Huff Post 1.0.
Here are some other updates to expect in future versions:
- search functionality
- full-screen article page views as an option that you can pinch and zoom into and then keep as your default
- the ability to customize the sections that you want to see at the top of your navigation list
- Big News topic pages that follow huge stories like WikiLeaks as they break and develop
- instant refresh so you can quickly see new stories as soon as they’re published
- account creation as well as Twitter-based sign-in for commenting
Customers can email feedback directly to ipad@huffingtonpost.com.