Assuming the Good Food dummy submission passes muster in Cupertino, which it should do, although you never quite know with Apple, then the BBC plans to launch an iPad app version of Good Food magazine, from the February 2011 issue.
Listening to publisher Alfie Lewis and editor Gillian Carter, I didn’t get the impression that this was in any way a box-ticking exercise. In its twenty years, Good Food has always been a multi-platform brand and has churned out recipes through the magazine, books, events, TV shows, website and iPhone app (70k of which have been sold to date). It ceased being just a print product years’ ago.
The reason they are launching an iPad version is simply because they see it as potentially a major new route to market and one on which their content seems particularly well suited. The videos are crisp and clear and the images high resolution and bright. One of the designers was struck by how “beautiful the pictures looked. Unlike on paper, the light is not reflected but comes through, so that the picture just glows.”
At the outset, the Good Food team, working with Mobile IQ, faced some broad strategic choices before they could start designing anything. First up was the much debated ‘Replica vs Repurposing’ question. I don’t get the impression that they wasted too much time on this one. Why go for a PDF, asked Alfie Lewis, which people can’t read? Why try to shoehorn a print format into this new medium? So, repurposing it was. Yes, the broad content would be the same as the print edition, but it would be presented in such a way as to fully utilise the dynamics of the iPad.
The original plan was to launch with the November issue, but the creative team were not keen on starting to develop an app for an issue which was already half way through the planning cycle. They would have had to unpick and adapt material that had already been designed with print in mind. Much better, they all agreed, to begin with a clean sheet, with an issue not yet started on; and the first available was February.
Another strategic decision was file size, and they decided that this had to be kept low, no greater than 50MB. “The blue download bar just has to be kept moving,” said Lewis. So, strict self discipline and a limit on the number of videos should ensure there’s no need for overnight downloads.
Editorially, the team was determined to make the app as practical and easy to use as possible, so that readers would actually cook from it.
So, with ‘usability’ and a determination to fully optimise their content for the iPad underpinning everything, they started designing. Where stuff from the print version couldn’t be improved upon (font styles, icons), then they were transferred directly to the app. The core of the magazine is recipes, and in the app, each is presented as a full screen, mouth-watering and beautifully photographed dish, which flips over to show a cook card, with ingredients listed in the top half and instructions in the bottom half; very clean and stylish, with loads of white space. Search is available throughout, as are extra layers of information, like a glossary. A degree of personalisation is possible, through the shopping list function, where you can build, edit and annotate your shopping list, across recipes. In the dummy version we saw, you weren’t able to attach notes to the recipes themselves, but it was clear from audience feedback on the night that this would be welcomed. I have a sneaking suspicion that this feature will be there, if not for the launch, then very soon after. The other audience suggestion, with kitchen spillages in mind, was a Good Food branded splash cover for the iPad.
Two exclusive video clips will be featured in each issue. They will be short videos of the in-house Good Food cooks, not megabyte hungry celebrity chefs, demonstrating key techniques; for example, in a lasagne recipe, they might embed a two minute video on how to make the perfect roux.
Given their rejection of the replica PDF route, they have not even tried to migrate the print advertisements to the app. Essentially, the Good Food app is likely to start life as a purely editorial offering, but the commercial teams are already talking to media agencies, exploring how their clients can create attractive commercial propositions that add to the user experience, yet deliver a return for the client. As Alfie Lewis acknowledged, it might initially be harder for advertisements to stand out as much on the iPad, where they can be ignored at the swipe of a thumb, as they do in print, but with creative thinking, he was confident that exciting commercial formats would evolve. But he also felt that, despite positive noises from clients, they would not fully engage until the number of app sales reached critical mass.
From what I could see, the Good Food team have eschewed quick fix solutions and have come up with a highly impressive and well thought through app. No one was rash enough to make any predictions as to likely app sales, but I sensed a definite buzz. “We don’t have a crystal ball,” said Alfie Lewis, “but we’re all really behind it”.
