Review: Wired Magazine’s iPad Experience

With their new $4.99 iPad app, Wired seems eager to recreate the visual impact of the print magazine experience. Weighing in at 500mb, the digital magazine also features rich media that includes short clips of audio and video.

The major flaw to the experience, and one that is noted in the introduction by Chris Anderson, is the lack of social media features.

By preserving the print magazine experience without the allowing the reader to interact with the content, Wired is essentially selling a $4.99 PDF.

While the text and images are fluid to the orientation of the iPad, and there are attempts to integrate dynamic content, the experience is not very interactive. Locked text and images means users can’t save, copy-and-paste, pinch-to-zoom nor share the content to engage with it in any meaningful way.

It is regressing to a previous model of the print experience, even porting over the back-page ads.

As the first attempt at an iPad magazine experience, it seems like an exercise in streamlining production for a print and digital version of the content. The implemented multimedia are attempts to ensure advertisers that their content will engage audiences.  Sometimes, this comes at the expense of leaving the magazine, as you can see when we tried to tap through to Incase from this ad.

Where the magazine can improve the most, is by designing a clear interface of what content is interactive. Because the app preserves the visual aesthetics of the magazine, which was designed for print, UI elements are unclear as to what content in the magazine is interactive.

There are no indications on what is tapable, nor when there is additional content to discover by scrolling up or down.

We hope future issues will consider the readers as much as they’ve catered to the advertisers in this first attempt, and give us more of a reason to download the app instead of accessing the same content through the Wired website.

Wired