A book requiring a login to open it every time – A Manual of Acupuncture v2 Review

I am an owner of the previous app and been witnessing the fixes over the years on this new app. Knowledge is only as useful as you can access it and I have a bad memory so I use apps and books. As a UX designer and Chinese medicine student i bought this app as soon as I found it available. The single biggest issue I have is wasting time accessing information in the app. Let’s consider I am using it to reference some information and I open the app and encounter a login screen then I have to wait so many seconds to get a successful login to the server. Then I have to navigate to the previous section or task I was doing the last time. If you compare this to a book that you have laid open on a counter it is slower and less useful if you wanted a quick reference. I would like to suggest a few changes in order to address my pain points. # Enable caching of user authentication for at least a month. If they open the app from a closed state within that month send a reauth in the background once a day to make it so that month is now a month since I last opened this app. Open me to the page I was last on too and scroll position. If I haven’t opened the app in a month, open the app anyways, but try to login with my stored details and give me the limited version while you try to reauthenticate. Have a notification at the top saying you are trying to reauthenticate and once you reauthenticate allow all the features again. One of your target markets is students, students study in libraries and libraries don’t have the best WiFi or cell reception. I was in the library studying and I couldn’t use my “textbook” because WiFi wouldn’t work and I was just referencing my “textbook” a few hours ago and now I couldn’t, infuriating for something I spent a lot of money on so I could not bring a textbook around. I loved the previous app because you could access it as fast as a book reliably. Due to your efforts to minimize piracy you are providing a worse experience to paying customers. # Cache images, I am not sure why sometimes images take a few seconds to load but it’s the same issue I have with the login issue. I never wait for a point location to load on a book when I turn the page. Please cache images and login authentication. I want to use this app in a library with crappy WiFi. I think that is a understandable use case. I have more issues to raise but these are the biggest as I deal with these almost every time I use the app. Please fix these so I can use this app in a library with crappy WiFi and no cell reception, or I will have to put a pirated version of the book on my iPad, which doesn’t have login or loading issues. Badly implemented DRM provides worse experience for the paying customers more so than pirates. I would love to work on this app with you to make it better. Good work ☺️
Review by Eric Higashino on A Manual of Acupuncture v2.