Less human than human

There’s a theory that comes from robotics called the uncanny valley, which basically states that people are comfortable with lifelike robots, but only to an extent. The point at which robots become too much like humans but still aren’t human enough, something inside our heads gets turned off, actually repulsed by the facsimile. The valley that the theory refers to is a dip in a theoretical plotting of lifelikeness and familiarity – a smooth curve upwards until the line falls off a cliff only to shoot back up again. It’s a largely untested hypothesis at this point, because we haven’t exactly gotten around to creating lifelike robots, but it is a convenient shorthand for explaining all kinds of things, like why the incredibly rendered but cartoonish heroes of The Incredibles are a joy to any 7 year old but the near photorealistic characters of Final Fantasy feel hollow and creepy.

Times Reader 2.0, which launched today, is a collaboration between the New York Times and Adobe. It’s actually the third major release in a series of collaborations between the Times, Microsoft and now Adobe. The first version was a Windows-only affair, built on the nascent Windows Presentation Foundation, followed some time later by a Silverlight version for clamoring Mac users, though it worked only inside a browser. These first versions were built in collaboration with Microsoft to show off the capabilities of new Microsoft technology. The most recent incarnation scraps all of that to show off new Adobe technology, namely AIR, a rival to WPF and Silverlight, in the name of cross-platform compatibility; Times Reader 2.0 works the same on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

(It’s at this point that I should inform anyone who doesn’t know already that I work for msnbc.com, a friendly competitor of the Times and a partnership between Microsoft and NBC News. I try to keep my personal opinions informed and objective.)

One thing that’s become clear through the various incarnations is that Times Reader, regardless of the platform it’s built on, is the uncanny valley of digital newspaper design. It attempts to replicate the feel of a newspaper, something nearly everyone has at least a passing familiarity with, in a digital space, where the metaphor falls flat. Worse, it attempts to combine custom layout with automation to bridge the gap between a printed newspaper and an LCD screen. Anyone who’s every tried their hand at print design, from a neighborhood newsletter to a glossy magazine, knows that custom layout and automation are, at best, incompatible. And, on the web, automation has proven to be the winner.

Conservatism in the liberal media

Have you ever wondered why every news website looks pretty much the same? Header, navigation on the left, one squarish photo, stories with 2-4 160 pixel columns of text with a cropped photo in the top right. That’s the basic formula, the template that’s been used for the past fifteen years of news websites. Part of that template has been inherited from the design constraints of the past, part of it is imposed by automation and technological display limitations and part of it has been imposed by a conservative design attitude towards changing away from something that supposedly works (especially in this economy). These days, with such a heavily commodified product, low barrier to readers’ switching news sources and fear of anything that could cause a decline in “eyeballs”, no news organization wants to change what they know.

So, in that sense, it’s refreshing to see the Times take on something like Times Reader. Unfortunately, they’re attempting to marry the design of something they’ve been very good at for 150 years with something that we’re all still feeling around in the dark trying to figure out – they’ve punted by reverting back to newspaper design. Which isn’t really ever going to work.

The app itself is ok, if what you’re looking for is a way to read a newspaper on your computer. The text is crisp, though the typography could certainly use some work. It’s probably as good an AIR app as has ever been built, but that’s certainly a low bar for success. I’ve yet to be impressed with AIR as a platform, in much the same way that Java was a non-event on the desktop a technology generation ago. The promise of running anywhere is necessarily going to involve sacrifices and AIR is no exception – the applications feel heavy, use a lot of resources, have annoying UI inconsistencies and bugs (just try to use your scroll wheel with Times Reader) and will never have the polish and feel of a native application. For many users, this will be good enough (how else to explain the continue popularity of Microsoft Windows?) but for anyone who cares about the details of user experience, it’s always going to be a poor substitute.

A faster horse

But those are technical problems, the real sin of Times Reader is that it’s attempting to give readers what they say they want instead of what they actually need. Henry Ford is said to have quipped that if he asked his customers what they wanted, they would have asked for a faster horse. The Times has said that they’ve listened to readers and have delivered a newspaper-like reading experience on their computers, but it isn’t what they need to be building. Face it, if any New York Times’ reader could tell the Times what they needed , instead of what they wanted , they’d be running the company.

Times Reader may be an interesting stop-gap experiment, it may satiate the digital appetites of print subscribers wondering why they’re paying for the dead-tree edition, it may even provide a small new revenue stream. And, to be fair, it was likely a very cheap investment for the Times as they seem to be benefitting from a battle between titans to establish supremacy of their proprietary rich internet frameworks – I have no inside knowledge of the deals with Microsoft or Adobe but I’d be surprised if the Times spent any money at all on development of any version of Times Reader. But standing by while tech companies bludgeon each other does not a business plan make. And a faster robot horse is never going to become a flying car.