Five Ways Publishers Are Trying to Get You to Read the News on Your Watch

Even so, you probably still won't want to read the news on an Apple Watch

Apart from telling the time and showing messages from your phone, what is the Apple Watch, or any smartwatch, actually good for? We have seen plenty of attempts, but no clear answer yet.

That has not stopped media outlets from putting news on your wrist, and several have already set up shop in Apple's App Store. Of the 40 apps in the top 20 of the Chinese and US App Stores, 9 have launched an Apple Watch app. They include traditional giants such as The New York Times and CNN, newer outlets such as BuzzFeed and The Huffington Post, and, in China, NetEase and Tencent.

We tried all 9 to see how these media giants plan to persuade you to read the news on your watch.

One headline per screen

You would probably agree that one story per screen is something the size of a watch screen dictates.

This card-like design works much like a smartphone: swipe left or right to change stories, swipe up or down for details. It saves you a tap to open an article, and on a watch, every tap saved counts. Of the 9 apps we tested, 6 use this design, including Tencent, The New York Times and AOL.

Of those 6, 5 pair a picture with text. Only The New York Times uses plain text on a black background (as in the image above).

Headlines rewritten for the watch

Nobody likes holding up a wrist to read for long, and a good number of the apps we tested have rewritten their headlines for the watch.

Left: AOL's watch news. Right: its website

For LeBron James's buzzer-beater in the recent NBA playoffs, AOL's website and phone app ran the headline "Cavs' LeBron James changes play, hits jumper at horn to beat Bulls". The watch app changed it to "LeBron hits jumper at the buzzer to even series". It is shorter, fitting into 3 lines on the Apple Watch, and it drops the extra clause. A single-clause headline suits the quick glance people give their watch.

Headlines on the main screen of The New York Times app

The New York Times does this better. Each headline fills exactly one screen, with no picture. The shorter the headline, the larger the type, so the app makes full use of the Apple Watch's screen. The result is very easy to read. The Times has a dedicated team of editors who rewrite headlines for the Apple Watch. Its content comes only from 5 sections of its website, such as business, politics and technology, and leaves out features such as food and travel, which are not time-sensitive and do not suit a watch.

Only the opening

Even for a short news story of under 1,000 characters, reading the whole thing on an Apple Watch sounds crazy. Take Chinese: one screen holds at most 90 characters (10 per line, 9 lines), so you would be reading more than 10 screens in a row on your watch.

Left: NetEase News. Right: Tencent News

NetEase gives you only the first paragraph, which mostly fits on one screen. Tencent gives you 2 to 3 paragraphs, up to 3 screens, which is a bit much. Worse, Tencent News sets its body text in a dim gray with poor contrast. Perhaps Tencent wants to test your eyesight.

Headline and details in The New York Times app

The body text in The New York Times app is a single sentence, sometimes with a picture, in keeping with its minimalist style.

You may not believe anyone would put an entire article, word for word, onto an Apple Watch, but AOL did. AOL has four card-style stories in all. I had no wish to finish any of them, and I wondered where so many words on a watch had come from.

In the end I opened a story about the singer Taylor Swift dominating the Billboard Music Awards. It ran to 26 screens. An Apple Watch overrun with text looks foolish and absurd.

Do the reading on the iPhone

This brings us to Handoff. It works like a relay baton passed between the iPhone and the MacBook: work you start on your phone can be picked up on your computer without a break. The Apple Watch supports it too.

Say you read the opening of a story on your watch and want the full text on your phone. Just drag the icon in the lower-left corner of the phone's lock screen upward to open it.

But you have to be quick to pull out your phone. Get distracted for a moment and the icon disappears from the lock screen. Perhaps Apple will fix this in the next version of Handoff.

BuzzFeed won't let you read news at all

BuzzFeed's main screen

A news site with no news: it can be done.

BuzzFeed's Apple Watch app carries no news at all. Now and then it sends you a quiz with just 2 options, or simply a picture. It could not be simpler. It is the only one of these apps that asks the user to do anything, and you may suddenly find that the Apple Watch is good for something after all. Or you may quickly think, "Is this all my Apple Watch can do?!"

The dots on the screen can get in the way of reading. You are asked to answer a quiz, yet you cannot even see the options in full. Would you still pick one?

Still, this small flaw does not change the fact that BuzzFeed stands out among the apps we tested. Its app is simple and suits the Apple Watch. BuzzFeed has been one of the world's fastest-growing news sites over the past few years, and quizzes are its main source of content that spreads wildly on social networks. But a typical BuzzFeed quiz has more than 10 questions, each with more than one answer. That design cannot carry over to a watch.

Two apps that want you to keep swiping

With the layouts described above, you swipe left and right to change stories and up and down for details, which you should find tolerable. These two apps, though, let you swipe only up and down, and seem to want your finger rubbing the screen without end.

Realtime, the app from the news site The Huffington Post, and CNN both use vertical layouts. They are two of the 3 apps that do not use the horizontal card style of the other 6 (the third, BuzzFeed, only lets you take a quiz).

Realtime's phone app is well designed: scroll down and you see a great deal of news. Its Apple Watch app copies this pattern, but it plainly does not suit the watch.

What you see when you open Realtime

Open Realtime and the first thing you see is a pie chart (above). It tells you that 50 stories have been updated, but what is going on with these colors?! You might guess that each color stands for a news category, but which is which? I am not going to waste brain cells memorizing these damn colors.

Realtime's main screen

On the main screen, stories run vertically for a full 29 screens. There are no pictures, only text everywhere: headlines, publication times, categories. You may have to swipe for half a minute, then tap, before you see a story's details.

Each headline takes up half a screen in bold white type. Each story's category and time are also given in text, in other colors such as purple, green and red. Each screen holds about 3 colors, so Realtime clearly pays attention to detail. But has its design team spent its cleverness in the wrong place? However good it looks, you still may not want to read it.

Realtime's Comedy news

If you already know which category you want (Comedy, say), swipe down hard (or spin the Digital Crown like mad), and as you near the bottom (watch the progress bar in the image above), be careful not to overshoot...

CNN's main screen

CNN's main screen is similar to Realtime's, with both articles and categories. Unlike Realtime, CNN adds a "More" option to each category, which opens 10 more articles of the same kind. Thanks to this two-level structure, CNN offers more articles than Realtime.

CNN is also more flexible than Realtime. Press hard on the screen and you can customize the app. It has 12 news categories, including top stories, technology and entertainment. You can choose to show any of them and change them freely. You can also set each category to show one story or two. But having to dig into settings on a watch to sort through news sections is quite a chore.

Two decent apps

USA TODAY's headline, picture and details

USA TODAY may be the best. Its interface and layout are very simple: stories are arranged as cards, and apart from the headline, each has only a one-sentence summary. Add a picture, and you have enough to get the gist of a story. This may be the best way to present news on the Apple Watch.

Headline and details in The New York Times app

The other cleanly designed app comes from The New York Times. Apart from an occasional picture in the body, everything is text, which gives it the feel of an old-established newspaper. Headlines are white on black, bold and enlarged to fill as much of the screen as possible. Even if you find the Apple Watch screen too small, you will have no trouble reading. One detail is very well done: at the end of each headline sits a small downward arrow, prompting you to swipe down for the full text. This "full text" is at most 2 paragraphs and at least one sentence, but seeing the arrow may make you a little more willing to read on.

What happens when you press hard on the screen?

Force Touch is one of the Apple Watch's selling points. To trigger it, you press the screen harder than you would for an ordinary tap. Each app uses Force Touch differently.

On the Tencent News main screen, press hard and you can choose "Read on phone". When you then open the Tencent News app on your phone, you will see a pinned story marked with an Apple Watch icon. If you have marked several stories "Read on phone" on the watch, the phone still shows only one pinned story (the most recent). But this pinned item, which looks like a story, is really a folder: tap it and you see all the unread stories you marked on the Apple Watch. The feature is easy enough to understand once you know it, but anyone who has never used it will be baffled.

Left: Force Touch in NetEase News. Right: two input options

NetEase News offers two options here: comment and save. Commenting is fun, and there are three ways to do it: emoji, five preset phrases (for example, "My friends and I were all stunned"), and voice input. The only problem is that there are far too many emoji, at least 10 screens of them, which makes finding one very tedious.

The other apps all offer saving or sharing. USA TODAY has Save; CNN has its personalization settings (described above); Realtime offers three sharing options inside an article, email, Twitter and Facebook; and The New York Times has Save for later. They seem to have all had the same idea.

AOL, recently rumored to be up for sale, has given Force Touch no function at all.

Some "distinctive" designs

Nearly every app we tested sets its body text in high contrast, white on black or black on white. The exception is Tencent News, which uses gray on black. It looks understated to the point of baffling, and I am sure the gray text gets in the way of reading.

In most of the apps we tested, the body of a story sticks to the story. The exception is NetEase News. Its body is a single paragraph, which is good design. But at the end it tacks on a "hot comment", perhaps because NetEase's own comment team works so hard that it had to be included. I cannot see the full comment, and I would not want to read it on a watch anyway.

AOL's stories include the full text, but that is no use. If I ever read a whole story on the Apple Watch's tiny screen rather than on an iPhone, something would have to be wrong with me.

NetEase News for Apple Watch

While using NetEase News, I hit two small but serious bugs (software defects). In the first, the same story occupied both the 1st and the 5th slot. It was labeled "Top story", but there seems no need to stress it twice. In the second, after I tapped an iQiyi ad inside the app, I got stuck: there was no "Back" or "Exit", and I had fallen into a one-way trap. I did not dare tap again.

Cover image: Tnwcnd