Worth Reading: Simplicity in Apps

Khoi Vinh, former design director at NYTimes.com, has been a vocal critic of magazine publisher efforts on the iPad. One of his main criticisms: they’ve built far more complicated apps than necessary. Vinh writes on his blog Subtraction.com that maybe publishers aren’t so bad at least when compared to art galleries. He takes to task the new iPad app for one of his favorite museums, the Gagosian Gallery. For a diehard fan like Vinh, the app failed to deliver and left him befuddled.

[I[t’s all so intricate and fancy and unnecessarily complicated that it blows right past a great opportunity to engage people, like me, who want to consume art easily, effortlessly and on my own terms, without the hassle of deciphering an obstructive interface. The iPad is a fantastic platform for art in a way that no computing technology that came before it really was — I really feel strongly about this — but this app is not realizing the potential of the platform. That makes me sad.