This seems like a great idea until you are in the middle of reading an article and an alert pops up warning you that page you are on has been updated. Stories are constantly being updated by the BBC News team which makes the content feel very fresh.

Regular updates should be useful but instead they are distracting They have attempted to solve this by replicating the topics using a more traditional hamburger which provides a list of all your topics but having two ways to navigate to the same content feels a bit odd and almost like it has been added as an after-thought. If you have lots of topics, navigating through the endless list isn’t easy (especially if you have fat fingers like me). Topics are placed as tabs at the top of the page. For a start the navigation is a bit fiddly. Slightly awkward navigationįrom a UX angle there are a couple of niggles that are frustrating. For example, a topic such as “Gaming” has only a couple of recent articles and is mostly filled with outdated content making the personalisation feel ill thought through. At first glance this seems like a great addition, however there are hundreds of very specific topics to choose from and some of the more obscure topics have very few recent articles. Personalised news doesn’t work as well as it shouldĪll articles and news stories are tagged and users have the ability to personalise the interface based on broad categories like ‘Football’ or very specific current topics like “Greek Elections 2015”. The app seems to have taken on more of an editorial role in telling users what it is important rather than leaving users to decide what they feel is important. However, the tradeoff of using larger feature stories means that scanning the headlines requires much more scrolling to find the articles you are interested in which can become frustrating. The use of white space and large images make the app feel less cluttered and easy to use. More features, more scrolling, a more directed news experienceĪt first glance, the design of the new BBC App (right) is more modern and attractive than the previous version (left). We decided to see what the user experience was like. The BBC promised it will be a “great experience”, however the reviews in the App store are less than positive with an average rating of currently just 2 out of 5 stars and some very angry reviews.

Last Wednesday saw the launch of the new BBC News App for mobile devices and tablets.

Bbc news app