If you are weighing up the idea of developing an iPad-only magazine, here is a useful question: what does the native platform actually buy you?

It buys a few real technical advantages:

Technical advantages

• Gyroscope and accelerometer.
• Access to device data, such as contacts and photos.
• A more immersive experience, particularly for games.
• Support for in-app purchases.
• Camera access.
• Offline support.
• Smoother, more responsive graphics.

It may also buy a few promotional advantages:

Promotional advantages

• There is less competition in iTunes than there is on the web.
• App discovery is possibly better, if you compare old-school SEO with a handful of App Store categories.
• Push notifications.

But those advantages come with higher expectations.

Higher expectations

• App Store quality expectations are very high. Most websites would not stand a chance as apps. Customer reviews would bury them.
• Most leading publishers offer apps, but many of them are poor. Mashable, AllThingsD and Metro UK, to name a few, have distributed native applications that feel worse than their web counterparts.
• Many apps are opened once and deleted. That gives you a very narrow window to convince the reader.

I wrote that findability is possibly better in the App Store than on the web, at least when you compare the volume of competition. But try searching in Newsstand and the weakness becomes obvious. Discovery is not one of its strengths.

There is also the more practical question of how people find the apps they actually keep. How many of your frequently used apps did you discover by searching iTunes? How many came from a review or a recommendation? Once you ask that, the promotional advantages start to look less certain.

So it comes down to this: what content, beyond text, pictures and video, requires the technical advantages of a native platform over browser delivery?

Even if the answer is none, some publishers will still want to differentiate through user experience, and will learn Objective-C just to deliver text and pictures in a nicer wrapper. Fair enough. But then the question becomes sharper.

Is the user experience really going to be a differentiator for you?

There is no secret formula.

The only reliable option is to do excellent work. Everything else is either noise, luck, or a tactic that stops working once enough people copy it.

If it makes a difference, it probably does not scale. If it scales, it is probably the work.

Greg McKeown, writing for Harvard Business Review in The disciplined pursuit of less:

Why don’t successful people and organizations automatically become very successful? One important explanation is due to what I call “the clarity paradox,” which can be summed up in four predictable phases:

• Phase 1: When we really have clarity of purpose, it leads to success.
• Phase 2: When we have success, it leads to more options and opportunities.
• Phase 3: When we have increased options and opportunities, it leads to diffused efforts.
• Phase 4: Diffused efforts undermine the very clarity that led to our success in the first place.

Curiously, and overstating the point in order to make it, success is a catalyst for failure.

And Horace Dediu, in his recent article Think small:

Understanding the “fundamentals” of a product is far more important than having lots of products for the sake of diversification alone.

The fundamentals of a product are knowing its job to be done and thus its requirements which, when well executed, will position it precisely and unambiguously on an opportunity.

These two ideas sit neatly together. McKeown describes the organisational problem: success creates options, and options diffuse the focus that made the success possible. Dediu describes the product version of the same problem. More products do not automatically mean more opportunity if the company has lost sight of the job each product is meant to do.

This is why focus often becomes harder after success. Early on, constraints do some of the discipline for you. Later, the company has enough money, attention and confidence to chase every adjacent opportunity that looks plausible. Many of them will look plausible. That is the danger.

The better test is not whether the company can do more. It is whether doing more makes the product clearer, sharper and more useful. Diversification without fundamentals is just distraction with a budget.

‘Users’ attention is a rare and precious commodity.’

Technology is a brilliant enabler, which is exactly why it is so easy to get overexcited by it.

I see too many media owners reach for their to-do list whenever a competitor launches something new. The question is rarely why the other company did it, or whether the same problem exists here. The reflex is simply to match the visible feature. Another version of the same habit is even more familiar: ‘now that we have this module available, let’s put it here, here, here and there’.

A content management system with a rich module list is not an invitation to fill every empty space on every page. ‘Related’ is a weak reason to add anything. Every new element needs to solve a real problem, and it needs to solve it in the right way. Otherwise, you are wasting your users’ attention and diluting your own resources.

A simple test helps: why is this here? If an element, page or workflow cannot survive that question, it probably should not exist. When in doubt, cut.

Jared Spool has an interesting theory about market maturity. He argues that most markets start with technology, move into features and checklist battles, and eventually arrive at experience.

A similar path applies to the people who build products. When a designer, developer or product manager starts sprinkling features around the interface, you can usually tell they are still somewhere in the checklist stage. It takes experience to get to the bottom of things. Solving a problem often means looking back into the organisation itself before anyone produces code, copy or graphics.

This is also where expectations get awkward. Many people assume more money should buy more web design: more buttons, bigger forms, longer feature lists, more pages. Good design often gives them the opposite. Fewer things, more clearly arranged, with a better reason for each one to exist.

Jonathan Ive (senior VP of industrial design at Apple), 2 months ago:

We are really pleased with our revenues but our goal isn’t to make money. It sounds a little flippant, but it’s the truth. Our goal and what makes us excited is to make great products. If we are successful people will like them and if we are operationally competent, we will make money.

Pretty humble for the most valuable company of all time.

Leisa Reichelt, in Why most UX is shite, writes:

Companies who really care [about User Experience] shape their organisations, their accounting systems, their culture around their customers. […]

The UI is a symptom of organisational culture - you need to get beneath the skin to craft really, sustainably good UX. […]

There are no Five Simple Steps to making your UX fabulous, there is no simple fix. All of these things are hard and most of them start much higher up in the organisation than the average UX designer ever gets to. […]

Good UX is cultural.

This is the uncomfortable part. UX is often treated as a layer that can be added near the end: a cleaner interface, a better flow, a little research to make the whole thing look responsible.

Reichelt’s point is harder to avoid. The interface is usually a visible symptom of how the organisation works. If the culture, incentives and decision-making are not shaped around customers, the product will eventually reveal that, however polished the screens look.

Good UX does not come from a team being asked to improve the surface. It comes from a company that has organised itself around the people using the product.

Read the entire post.

The whole notion of social seems to make some leaders uneasy.

For a long time, it was acceptable to build a wall around your online presence and divide the world into ‘us’ and ‘them’. Much of internet ‘marketing’ was designed around pushing out a broadcast and converting it into page views and unique visits. It was a one-way numbers game, with very little to do with what real people needed.

That model is much harder to defend now. Almost everything people do online is social, or is being pulled in that direction: media, gaming, consumption, journalism, learning, television, discussion groups, forums, comments, fans, followers, tribes and interest groups. Technology enabled this change, but the interesting part is no longer technical. People are naturally drawn to other people with shared interests, questions and tastes.

If you ignore that shift, or see it and refuse to move, you risk becoming irrelevant without quite understanding why. This is not the kind of change a single business can opt out of. You can choose how to respond, but you do not get to vote on whether the change is happening.

Having a Twitter account or a Facebook page is not the same as understanding social. If you are not engaging in conversation, starting a movement, leading a community or joining one, you are probably confusing social with another RSS feed.

The uncomfortable part is that social makes you exposed. It removes some of the distance between the company and the people judging it. It encourages transparency, creates immediate feedback and leaves fewer places to hide.

That only looks like a problem if the work is mediocre. If the product is good, exposure helps. If the product is weak, exposure merely accelerates what people were going to find out anyway.

So when leaders are scared of social, the interesting question is what they are really scared of. My guess is that it is rarely the technology. It is the possibility that people will see the work clearly.

A while ago I read Tony Manning’s excellent Making Sense of Strategy. A few of his insights came back to me last night during a conversation about the importance of continuous strategic discussion inside an organisation.

Manning, on planning:

Many companies treat strategic planning as an annual rain dance, but wonderful plans don’t necessarily bring rain. Usually, they turn to dust.

On having a ‘fingertip feel’ for what is happening inside the business:

Meaningful strategic conversation requires rigorous probing into what your organization does, why, and how. But that doesn’t mean it’s exclusively a matter for top managers. The fact that they hog it in so many companies is precisely why it so often comes to nothing.

On the importance of frequent communication:

Choices, commitment, and capacity are not the products of machines. All result from people talking to each other. All come from that everyday activity - conversation - that we mostly take for granted and often use carelessly because it’s such an integral part of our lives.

If you’re not engaged in a constant conversation about what lies ahead, what it means, and what you should do about it, the world will pass you by.

And this is the key passage:

When people don’t talk about the right things - and don’t talk about them constantly, creatively, and constructively - things quickly come unglued. Parts of the organization come adrift and resources are sprayed in different directions. On the other hand, when people are informed, involved, and encouraged to speak their minds, miracles happen. Synthesis is most likely when people meet and talk face to face. So you should do everything possible to make this happen - and to make it easy.

The useful point here is that strategy is often treated as a document, when it is really a conversation. A plan can record choices, but it cannot keep an organisation aligned by itself. That work happens through repeated discussion: what is changing, what it means, what matters, and what should be done next.

This is why the annual planning ritual so often disappoints. It gives the appearance of discipline while leaving the real strategic work to a few meetings, a deck and a calendar reminder. Wonderful plans do not bring rain. People paying attention might.

If these quotes resonate, read the book.

Hamish McKenzie, writing for PandoDaily, has a useful piece on tablet-only magazines and the bundling problem:

Lest you think this is just a paper problem, keep a close eye on what’s happening with tablet-only magazines. If publishers thought tablets were going to be the saviors of their industry, they must be really bummed out by recent news that The Daily is cutting a third of its staff and the Huffington Post has decided to stop charging for its iPad magazine after just five issues. Working on the principle that three events equal a trend and two pass for a story, AdWeek last week asked “Are Tablet-Only Publications Dead?”.

But McKenzie’s conclusion is the important part:

But the game isn’t over for journalists and editors - it’ll just be leaner and different. They will have to produce content that can move easily outside the borders of pages and apps, content that can be shared - even purchased - at the click of a button, content that can live on the strength of its reporting and writing.

This is the better way to frame the problem. Magazines do not only have a device problem, and tablets were never going to fix the deeper issue by themselves. A beautiful app can still be a closed bundle with poor distribution, awkward discovery and content trapped inside the wrong container.

The future McKenzie points to is less comfortable for publishers, but probably healthier for journalism. The work has to travel well. It has to stand on the strength of its reporting and writing, rather than on the assumption that readers will keep opening another branded package.

The tablet may still be a good reading device. It is a weaker answer when treated as a business model.

Via Daring Fireball.

Jakob Nielsen has written a post about SEO and Usability, in which he briefly describes the relationship between the two disciplines.

I agree with Nielsen, but I think the point can be taken further. If you build an online service with user experience as the top priority, you will usually get a solid SEO foundation as part of the work. This does not mean SEO should be ignored. Quite the opposite.

The order matters. If you focus on users from the beginning, you can always adjust and improve the SEO later. The reverse is much harder. Start with SEO as the foundation, then try to add usability on top, and you are likely to end up with a product that serves neither purpose especially well.

A user-focused service already requires many of the things SEO tends to ask for:

• Organise content so it is easy to understand and navigate.
• Produce relevant content that reflects what readers actually want to read or see.
• Design a human-readable URL structure that reflects how the content is organised and where users are within the site.
• Structure HTML mark-up properly, with a small footprint and relevant elements used for their intended purpose: page titles, window titles, emphasis, quotes, images, paragraphs and meta tags.
• Create scannable layouts with meaningful headings, useful subheadings and paragraphs of appropriate length.
• Use plain, concise, marketese-free language that is easy to read and understand. Avoid ‘clever’ wording and pun headlines.
• Help users find more information through relevant category links and useful outbound links.

A full list of good UX practices would be longer, obviously. The point is that many of these are also the things you will find in SEO books.

That is the useful overlap. Do the user-centred work properly, and a large part of SEO stops being a separate layer. It becomes the natural result of making the service understandable, usable and worth reading.