{"id":2762,"date":"2013-07-15T19:58:02","date_gmt":"2013-07-16T00:58:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bytebot.net\/blog\/?p=2762"},"modified":"2013-07-15T19:58:03","modified_gmt":"2013-07-16T00:58:03","slug":"paywalls-need-usability-improvements","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bytebot.net\/blog\/archives\/2013\/07\/15\/paywalls-need-usability-improvements","title":{"rendered":"Paywalls need usability improvements"},"content":{"rendered":"

A while back I stated that paywalls aren’t bad<\/a>. But they are downright annoying when it comes to sharing articles. It breaks the whole flow of the sharing economy – I like to tweet links to things that I find of interest, and when the other party can’t view it, it surely gets quite annoying.<\/p>\n

Paywalls also start imposing IP inspection. Malaysiakini has done this and you are forced to re-login regularly. Its very annoying as it breaks the flow again and you’re now logging in, then being redirected. So it works like this: click on article, see logged out screen, click on login, then be re-directed to the article. By this time I’ve lost interest in reading.<\/p>\n

Newspapers are read by a whole household. I know of offices reading a single newspaper. Heck, in the clubs that I frequent, probably a hundred people read the same newspaper in the sauna. Paywalls should ensure that the household is taken care of.\u00a0<\/p>\n

What about the modern concept of a household? Father and mother living in the Philippines, daughter working in Malaysia and son working in Dubai? Isn’t this still a household? Paywalls like those for the FT\/NYTimes seem to understand this (or are not taking action at the moment), but the Malaysiakini paywall slaps you with the crappy user interface above.<\/p>\n

I want online media to succeed but broken paywalls aren’t going to cut it.<\/p>\n

On my to-subscribe list is BizKini, which brings a Malaysiakini subscription to a ringgit a day. This is basically the same price you’ll pay for a newspaper in print! Is their reporting that much better that its worth all the pain of the above? I’m not so sure.<\/p>\n

So besides a broken login UI, how does one improve sharing?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A while back I stated that paywalls aren’t bad. But they are downright annoying when it comes to sharing articles. It breaks the whole flow of the sharing economy – I like to tweet links to things that I find of interest, and when the other party can’t view it, it surely gets quite annoying. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[1529],"class_list":["post-2762","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","tag-paywalls"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4vJD-Iy","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bytebot.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2762","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bytebot.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bytebot.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bytebot.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bytebot.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2762"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.bytebot.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2762\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bytebot.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2762"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bytebot.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2762"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bytebot.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2762"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}