Essays

What AI and machine learning can achieve in the creative realm AI, machine learning and neural networks have begun to enter the creative realm in a variety of ways, all of which are bound to have a significant impact not only on what kind of visual output…

As it is becoming increasingly clear that digital media alone cannot provide the revenue streams publishers need in order to maintain their level of quality, maybe it is time to re-think what publishing really about.

Facebook Messenger on Android and iOS now supports Instant Articles. For publishers, this could make a huge difference — and it also shows us where social media is headed.

In the flurry of publishers’ apps that has been hitting the market over the past few years, the one which was just launched by Quartz certainly stands out: instead of allowing you to simply access top stories from the site in a mobile-friendly way, Quartz-the-app uses the interface of a chat environment to present the user with a small selection of items culled from the publisher’s site, and let’s you interact in a chat-like way. What does it tell us about the future of news distribution?

2015 was a, let’s say, intense year for publishers; and we have every reasons to believe that 2016 is going to be at least as active, but most likely even more overpowering if you are in the media business. How can you prepare yourself for the coming year?

The first part of this overview of distributed content has been posted less than a month ago, yet what then appeared like the relatively stable picture of a new trend in publishing, a few weeks later looks more and more like a confusing mess of new distribution technologies, few of which have yet proven their worth, let alone their necessity.

Facebook’s new Notify app sits, somewhat uncomfortably, between Twitter, Apple’s News app and Snapchat. What is it really about?

The arrival of distributed content platforms such as Facebook Instant Articles is a formidable challenge for publishers and media-producers, a call to action to redefine what professional media is all about - and an instigation to question oversimplified assumptions. This second part of an in-depth analysis of key distributed content initiatives focuses on the major players and their core audience.

The arrival of Facebook Instant Articles, Apple's News app, Twitter Moments and Google AMP are the beginning of a profound change in publishing: extreme content fragmentation, driven by social media platforms. In this first installment of a three-part essay, we analyze the impact of distributed content for publishers.

Apple's News app is now available as part of the upgrade to iOS 9. While it seems similar to news aggregation apps like Flipboard, it could play an important rolein the advent of distributed content...

Content marketing is all the craze, but what are the emerging challenges and impending evolutions? The Pfeiffer Report speaks with Rebecca Lieb, analyst, author of Content Marketing: Think Like a Publisher and one of the world's experts on the subject.

Digital Marketing is all the craze, but there are bigger battles looming. Who will dominate in the emerging post-digital marketing space?

Apps are essential. When we buy a tablet or a smartphone, it is a world of apps we are acquiring; by that token, the app store’s efficiency in pinpointing exactly the right apps for our needs is paramount to the overall value of a device. But how good are they? This report answers two simple questions: first, how mature are the three major app stores, and, more importantly, how good could they be? The answers may surprise you…

Cognitive load—the sum of elements you need to get familiar with in order to use a device spontaneously and intuitively—is one of the key aspects of user experience for a non-technical user. Differences between different devices and mobile operating systems are significant.

An ideal device should provide a completely natural user experience. We should be able to use it without having to learn anything, Interactions should be intuitive, every operation should be smooth and natural. We should not have to wait for the device to do anything, nor should the device keep us guessing at what is necessary to achieve a certain goal.

The device universe is probably one the most important aspects of tablet and smartphone user experience, and has hardware becomes more and more commoditised, its importance can only increase.

User experience is one of the key aspects of connected digital devices, yet it is very difficult to discuss in an objective way, and even harder to quantify.

They may have comparable hardware features, but there are significant user experience differences between different tablets. Find out more...

Apple just announced 50 billion app downloads; Google is still slightly behind at the time of this writing, with 48 billion apps downloaded to date, but given the number of monthly downloads, it is only a matter of time before Google will claim the top spot. What is wrong with this picture?

Why is it that the arrival of iOS 7 is necessarily a momentous event for the smartphone market? Simple: Unlike any other operating system out there, it will be in the hands of millions or tens of millions of users within a few days after its launch. And that will make it a force to be reckoned with. The question is, of course: How good is it really?

How good are the app stores really? Do they live up to the potential of 1 million apps? Shouldn't there be a more sophisticated way of cataloguing, browsing and making discoverable the vast array of apps that are out there?

Big changes often start with relatively small steps. Frequently, the first iterations of groundbreaking technologies are initially not perceived at their true disruptive potential. Is Salesforce Identity one of these technologies?

Amazon has started offering customers of real books e-book versions at reduced cost. Nice gesture - but what does it really tell us about emerging patterns of media consumption?

There is only one big question about iOS 7, and that is: can Apple pull it off? Meaning of course: can Apple make the market, the average consumer, actually get excited about what it is trying to achieve with the new version of its mobile operating system? Is the market ready for reasonable efficiency, ready to do away with visual gadgetry to focus on what really counts on a device?

User experience, comfort of use and other seemingly intangible aspects are often assumed to be by definition unmeasurable, unquantifiable. Yet when you start looking more closely, that is not entirely the case, or shouldn’t be. If there is the perception of a difference, there should also be a way of describing it, and, at least to some extent, quantify it.

When it comes to the crunch, it's user experience that makes the difference between a merely functional device and an excellent one. But is it possible to measure something as elusive as user experience? That's the question we were trying to answer. The results may surprise you...

This essay was first published almost 8 years ago, years before the first iPhone or the iPad. Have things changed that much since then?