Thursday 2 February 2017

New Bloomberg iPad App Review

Yesterday I was forced to update the Bloomberg App on my iPad, which I was a bit reluctant to do as the old one I thought was good, useful and fairly easy to use. The presentation of the old version looked good, maybe a little cluttered, but after a short time I really liked how I could get quickly get a good overview of markets, currencies and the latest news on one page.

After installing the latest version and running it my first impression was how I disliked the presentation, the previous app was dark, and easy on the eye, the new one has a lot of white and feels too bright. The new home screen does not give an overview of stock markets and currencies, which is something I liked in the previous version. Even when you go to the markets page, you cannot get a good overview, you have to select the area of interest from a drop down.

The overall screen layout feels as if it was designed for a phone and not a tablet. The previous version felt like a complete piece of software, this version feels like a basic or lite version.

While using the App it felt a little buggy, the refresh of currencies does not seem to work and I had to go out of the screen and back in for it to refresh correctly. I am not confident the graphs work correctly either (see image below), when looking at the performance of one stock it showed the month being "Feb 2017", with 31 days, the current date was the 1st so it felt the label for the month was incorrect and should have displayed "Jan 2017".



Overall this App feels like it has been rushed and has not go through the QA department correctly. I think they need to employ some UX designers to try to get the usability right, maybe they should also consider doing some end-user testing to get some feedback, the reviews on the app store are appalling, which is understandable. The previous version I would have rated 7/10, this new version I would give 2/10.