The future of print magazines? Only a part of it.

Published on Dec 17, 2009 by Billy Belchev | Category: design | 0 comments

While enjoying my morning homemade espresso, I stumbled upon a video of a prototype digital magazine reader called Mag+ and dubbed by some as the future (and the savior) of print magazines.

While I believe that magazines may well be delivered on a digital device in the not-too-distant future, I certainly doubt that just a change of delivery medium will save the news / magazine publishing industry. But this post is not actually about that.

The video of the prototype is noteworthy for a different reason. While working on the prototype, London-based design consulting firm BERG conducted contextual research about the magazine reading experience—how people actually read print magazines, what physical properties of the medium they enjoy, and so on.

What BERG discovered, once again, is that literal translations of user interfaces from one medium to another are often a bad idea. For example—the page turning metaphor. Works in print, does not work on a digital device. Yet most software magazine readers that I have seen have a version of it, animations and all, to preserve the "authenticity" of the experience. It never felt authentic to me, just cumbersome.

BERG's design research confirmed that vertical scrolling of a one-column layout is a much, much better UI approach for digital reading (like the layout used by most blogs and mobile platforms, which they also observed).

So if a cool yet usable digital reader is needed to save any industry, I congratulate BERG on taking the right approach to designing Mag+. The video of the prototype has other useful insights for digital-touch user experiences based on the all-powerful design research process.