Jakob Nielsen wrote a great piece this week (here) analyzing the miserable ratings reviewers have given the Wall Street Journal’s iPhone app. Across 68,418 reviews, the WSJ’s app gets an overall 2 star rating.
Nielsen attributes this to a confusing interface design. ”It’s clear that people are deeply offended by being asked to pay again for mobile access to the newspaper when they’re already paying for a wsj.com subscription.” Yet, “mobile app access is free to paying website subscribers: they simply have to log in with their existing userid and password.”
He explains that after downloading the WSJ app, the subscribe option is the strongest call to action on this startup screen.
This made me wonder: how is the New York Times’s mobile app doing in Apple’s App Store?
Turns out it’s a tied game at 2 all. (Rated at two stars each, that is.)
The NYT’s app does a much better job forthrightly outlining access options, much in line with Nielsen’s recommendations for the WSJ. It’s the poor performance of the Times’s app that produces a lot of 1- and 2-star ratings: freezes, slow loading, crashes, etc.
You be the judge. Here are subscription options — spread across three screen grabs – from an article on the NYT’s app.
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