MSNBC News App for iPhone Thinks it is a Read-Only Twitter: Note to Zumobi/MSNBC – Bad Idea

MSNBC teamed with Zumobi to create a free iPhone news app that breaks with conventional designs for iPhone news apps…

MSNBC 1.0

I thought something was wrong with my iPhone after launching the MSNBC app for the first time because the items on the screen began scrolling upwards on their own. Why would any designer think this is a desirable feature? The whole idea of a news app is the give the user control over what is read and when. This scrolling is configurable but still seems like a bad idea to me. Scrolling takes away the “when” control, at least until you turn it off. Perhaps Zumobi and thinks that news apps should be like Twitter. IMHO, news apps shouldn’t be like Twitter. The next design feature is another oddity: There is no way to choose news categories. There doesn’t appear to be a way to read just business news, tech news, entertainment or any other specific categories. You just get this stream of news… Again, kind of like Twitter.

The MSNBC app is definitely the product of a number of convention breaking design choices. I’m not particularly thrilled with any of them so far. But, it deserves credit for trying to break away from the design conventions that have emerged among iPhone news apps.

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