When Apps Go Wrong

I love how good onions bring me to tears.  Sadly, there are bland onions as well and The Onion's iPhone mobile app falls into that category.  You can get your daily laugh riot on an iPhone with their superb writing from the main website, the mobile website, using Apple's Reader, or through their personal mobile app.

Loading up the app, I get a 1990's style animated gif ad on the bottom of the screen which does a great job of grabbing my attention and pissing me off with a quasi real message.

Hey I have a new message!  Wait a min ...

This is not how I want to read their stories so I thought I would try other ways of accessing their content.  Let's hit up the website, which automatically forwards me to their mobile version.

Much better!  Got rid of that horrible ad on the bottom.  In fact, there are only two ads on the page, one above the main image and another at the very bottom.  It's a clean layout with a good choice of fonts, thumbs up.

I clicked on Apple's Reader tab, and the main article's image is removed, but the other image inside the article is still present.  Not perfect but the font is even better for reading and the story in my opinion becomes easier and quicker to access.

In terms of readability, this is the best.

Lastly, I opened the main site to see how that was handled on my smaller screen.

Damn good? Do they sell just ok gifts to?

Ads, ads everywhere.  This is how The Onion makes its money so I'm not going to cry a river.  On the plus side, with the ads formatted outside the main body of text, it becomes an easy double tap on the screen to get this,

The font is a little smaller, but it comes close to the mobile app in terms of usability.

The question I asked myself here is, "When do you really need a mobile app?"  In this case if you're only reading through articles on The Onion's website, it's just a waste.  I could read, scroll, and share just as easily, if not better at times, with the online mobile website compared to the app.

If I was going to do an app for The Onion, I think we can go a much better route.  Like Al-Jazeera's iPad app, open up to a video to get the user's attention.  There could be a pile of fun just waiting to happen with some simple ad-lib programing for their stories or even incorporate fake places on a map overview.  Something, anything, is better than reserving your main website's stories again with poor real estate and bad ads.