I love The New Yorker. Both as a curator of brilliant cultural articles and also as an organization not afraid to embrace technology. They were one of the first to come out with pretty solid iPad and iPhone apps for the venerable magazine.

I also love their cartoon caption contest and am amazed by how creative people's responses often are, although I've never voted for any of them before.

However, I was so impressed by one of the responses in the March 24th 2014 contest that for the first time I decided to vote. I happened to be using the New Yorker iPhone app and saw a conveniently located 'Tap to Vote' button. Oh, great! I can vote right from the app! So I tapped it!

Well, the wheels came off pretty quickly at that point. Here are all the things that seem wrong.

There should be no reason to take me to an in-app browser. I should simply be able to 'like' or 'vote' the responses by clicking on or around them.
If you must take me to a Web view then please don't take me to a crappy one. The one that isn't even formatted for mobile.
And if you must take me to crappy Web view, the least you can do is not ask me to log-in again! You are charging me for accessing the magazine! You know very well who I am!
If you must make me log in because you don't know who I am then at least make me log in with a more dignified page. Don't make me enter all that info and make me horizontally scroll!
And if all else failed and you had good reasons to not be able to build an in-app version of this for the last 3+ years that you've had the app then why not just make me jump to a regular browser and not an in-app one? That would at least be less terrible than what we have now.

Magazines are fast becoming irrelevant in the new information age. Even on the iPad, there is a lot wrong with them as explained here and here quite nicely by Justin Williams. Almost all of them have taken the lazy shortcut of dumping scanned, imaged versions of their pages on to the iPad. They barely take advantage of the amazing interactively provided by the medium. And when they do - they actually make it worse by hiding stuff and making you tap before you can see it.

Things like the ability to participate in a contest online should be exactly the area where magazines need to put in effort to make a solid statement for relevance. And that's what's been left out as a crude afterthought.

File that one under the Department of Terrible App Experiences, New Yorker!