October 29, 2003

Taking a liking to digital replicas?

The News Hour has a piece about how more users and pub­lish­ers are taking to dig­i­tal replica edi­tions.

I haven’t per­son­ally used them, but I’ve seen demos. I don’t par­tic­u­larly like them. As a designer, I think they suffer from some usabil­ity issues.

But if some read­ers do like to use them, then this is a case where both the busi­ness side and the users can win.

I’m going to ven­ture a guess, that dig­i­tal replica users are most likely con­verts from the print prod­uct — prob­a­bly in the older demo­graphic range. If that’s the case, I can under­stand why they’re taking to them.

As an indus­try, we’ve trained gen­er­a­tions of read­ers about our print edition’s user inter­face. The replica edi­tions lever­age the users past expe­ri­ence (albeit with some dif­fer­ences) with the ease of dig­i­tal delivery.

I know some folks in the indus­try don’t like the replica edi­tions — but in keep­ing with my dif­fer­ent strokes view of elec­tronic pub­lish­ing, I say why not have them as an option.

A replace­ment for a Web site (and RSS feeds, and e-mail, and what­ever comes next) — no. A prod­uct in addi­tion to a tra­di­tional Web site — why not?

Filed under: Web design

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