brand & marketing

Mobile Application Review – BBC News

By Martin Rosenmejer,
User Experience Research Consultant
at fhios.

What is it?
BBC News

Purpose
Provides updated news from BBC.

Download?
Free from Android Market app store.

Overview
The BBC News app is a very popular app to Android and has received good reviews.

So what does it do?

Figure 1: Home screen with the BBC News icon.

The BBC News app displays one heading, a related picture, and the chosen news category (e.g. ‘Most Popular’) (Figure 1). Interestingly, there is no BBC logo displayed on the app icon on the home screen. The app icon is small and the lonely heading makes it unclear that this is a news feed at all.

Figure 2: BBC News app page.

When clicking the app on the home screen, a page opens with two tabs. The first tab conveniently displays a list of news. The tab is named after what category of news it is listing (e.g. ‘Most Popular’, ‘News’ ‘Front Page’, ‘Business’ etc.). The page provides a good overview of the recent headings with a teaser text. It is easy to click on a heading and go to the full article on the BBC website. The second tab is a list of news categories and the user can here select the preferred news category that should be listed under the first tab and displayed on the home screen icon. This selection is convenient and the user can both get a general news overview by selecting the ‘Most Popular’ category or more detailed news feed by picking one of the available categories.

What doesn’t it do?
The size of the home screen icon cannot be modified and it can only display one heading at a time. Thus, the app doesn’t provide an overview of the recent news before entering the app.

What others have to say
The reviews are generally positive towards this app. Some users have experienced problems that the app continues downloading content after exiting. It slows down other apps and can be expensive if free internet is not supported on the phone plan.

Final thoughts
The BBC News app provides easy access to news from the Android handset. However, it doesn’t take advantage of the flexible home screen functionality of the Android platform. The platform supports different sized apps on the home screen and it would be convenient if the icon could be enlarged and the number of headings displayed could be modified i.e. so a list of news headings was displayed.

© 2010 fhios insights.