Now that I’ve been using the app for a week, I’ll go as far as to say that it represents the future of daily newspapers on tablets. Or rather, it represents what I hope newspapers look like on tablets. I think it has just the right amount of customization, it gets the interface metaphor right, and it’s good software.

Just the right amount of customization

Flipboard is popular because it lets you customize a magazine with only the sources you care about. Facebook is popular because you only see updates from your friends, and you can filter those updates to be only about the types of information that you like.

There’s a danger with that for news apps, though. If you’re reading the news is to learn more about what’s important, then what’s important isn’t necessarily what’s most interesting to you. Eli Parser does a nice job talking about this issue in The Filter Bubble.

And this issue especially applies to news apps. In USA Today, I can customize the weather forecast, and I can choose what sports scores appear by default, but I can’t change what news stories are presented. While they’re not always something I’m interested in, I recognize that they are what the editors think are important, and I trust that I’m being informed.

In other news apps I’ve tried, I found they went too far in the other direction – not enough customization. In the New York Times app, you can’t customize the home screen at all. In the Wall St Journal and The Daily, customization is there but is limited.

It gets the interface metaphor right

In Over-Doing the Interface Metaphor, Marco Arment says that the danger in making your software mimic the real world too faithfully is that you unnecessarily port over drawbacks of the physical objects too. (I highly recommend reading his whole post.) I agree with him, and I think furthermore that if you are going to make elements in your application look like real-world objects, you have to make them behave like they would in the real-world.

USA Today for iPad does this fairly well. The light grey background color, the wavy top edge, and rough side texture look like a newspaper. And I like that you can flick most pages like you would an actual newspaper, but the animation isn’t overdone like some e-readers.

The New York Times app avoids too many interface metaphors entirely, so it doesn’t feel like a newspaper at all and it’s not as pleasant an experience. The WSJ is very aggressive about looking like a real newspaper, to the extent you have to flip page by page to see all the articles instead of in a summary view like USA Today. The Daily goes way overboard with its carousel metaphor for issues, which does not make it a good experience.

It’s good software

The USA Today app is a good user experience because it appears to be well-written software. Transitions are smooth and snappy. All of the features beyond articles – such as videos and the crossword puzzle – work very well. And content updates happen quickly and silently in the background. There is never any waiting for content to load.

While the Daily has very poor performance, the New York Times and WSJ both seem to be well-written software. However, good performance combined with good customization and a nice interface make the USA Today app the one I like the most.

So while not perfect, the USA Today app is very good. And while they might not have the best writing, it’s a good enough app to make USA Today my daily newspaper. And that’s pretty impressive.