Google Fast Flip Misses the Point
Tech blogs were buzzing yesterday about Google Fast Flip.
The new experimental service allows users to flip through screenshots of web articles from “three dozen top publishers,” according to the announcement on The Official Google Blog. You can choose to sift through latest articles or specify a vertical or source publication—typical filtering mechanisms also available in the more traditional interface of Google News.
Fast Flip aims to speed up news consumption by eliminating the need for end users to load an entire page (including the publisher’s template, navigation, ads, and analytics tags) to read an article.
To make up for showing more than the accepted fair use summary of articles, Google will share an undisclosed percentage of revenue on the ads shown next to the screenshots.
The product concept is interesting, but its execution misses the mark in two major ways:
Aggregation
As a high-touch opt-in service for publishers, Fast Flip faces an uphill battle to gain breadth and diversity of source articles. Its baseline content providers show a heavy bias toward major national and international media companies.
Under this model, users never see content from small hyperlocal or niche vertical publishers who may have innovative coverage in their area of expertise. And smaller publishers can’t easily opt-in through a form on the Fast Flip site—presumably they must contact Google via email and prove reach or name recognition to warrant the time Google would spend setting up a rev share deal and what seem to be screenshots at a custom size for each publisher (screenshots for Salon.com are 995px wide, whereas those for Fast Company are 640px wide and those for BBC are 655px wide).
Improving the UX of News Consumption
Does Fast Flip fulfill its lofty goal of saving users from the sometimes-painful load times of media sites?
The product claims to bring the experience of reading a magazine online, but the interface more closely resembles that of a microfiche machine (hat tip to Outiside.in Biz Dev VP Camilla Cho for the observation) and provides neither the physical immediacy of print nor standard web conventions to guide users through content.
By sticking screenshots of articles into a bulky wrapper, Google breaks the page layout and UI choices of each original site design. By centering publishers’ templates within the Fast Flip interface, Fast Flip often pushes the content out of prime locations where we’re used to focusing our eyes.
The screenshots also kill accessibility and interactivity. Without HTML, no one can click on links within the article, play embedded video, or enlarge photos. Users with screen readers are hosed and the weak of sight can’t use their browser settings to resize fonts.
For all those normal features of web browsing, you have to visit the original article, complete with long download time and a jarring experience of adjusting from the Fast Flip-wrapped screenshot to the original site.
We love to see innovative interfaces for news consumption, but this one doesn’t seem up to snuff. Publishers, what do you think? Is Fast Flip the kind of interface you’d like to see your readers using?
