Why is subscribing to The New York Times so complicated?
That’s Khoi Vinh’s question, and it’s one that I had a few months ago when I had just moved into an apartment and was deciding which subscription to get. The complexity of the digital-only options, which Khoi discusses, ultimately led me to choose a weekend print subscription, which includes access to the website and both the iPhone and iPad applications. (I also enjoy flipping through the beautifully designed weekend magazines, whose digital incarnations, squeezed into web and app templates, I find much less engrossing.)
The treatment of the iPhone and iPad apps is particularly weird, I think. It makes no sense that subscriptions to the apps are sold separately (in a web + iPhone app package and a separate web + iPad app package), and it certainly makes no sense that the two packages are priced differently. I suppose I’d be more inclined to pay a premium for the iPad app if it were great, but it’s still a poor substitute for the print Times and a poorer substitute, in my opinion, for nytimes.com.1
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This is a separate post, I think, but the design of the Times iPad app is, in my view, an argument against a rigid application of gridded conformity. It’s boring to read the Times on a tablet when every swipe reveals a page that looks identical to the last. Khoi, whose design for the Times’s website is still in place, literally wrote the book on designing with grids, and yet that site is as varied and surprising as the iPad app is lifeless. ↩
