Always willing to try a new user interface

Visiting my parents this weekend I thought I might make use of their print edition of the Observer. After all, every weekend I follow links from @realdmitchell and @victoriacoren to their articles in there - I quite like the Observer, I read its content, it was just sitting on the sofa next to me, why not give it a whirl?

I discovered almost immediately why not. The UX is unuseable nonsense. Look at the thing! A big pile of pieces of paper stapled together into sections apparently selected by theme. I've no idea which of these sections David Mitchell or Victoria Coren's articles are in - I doubt they're considered "Food Monthly", and they're probably not "Sport" unless poker is a sport, or David Mitchell is having one of his occasional anti-football polemics. But there's no viable search function apart from a big ad on the front page of the news section for the one magazine that I'm pretty sure they're not in.

After a minute of idly scanning pages in the hope of pure serendipity, during which my eyes passed over a few pages of ads and I was reminded how Ikea forces you to walk through most of the store just to find the table you want, I gave up. I dug out my phone, opened up Twitter and followed the links.

People are apparently surprised that ebooks have already overtaken paper. Those people should have a go at using paper again. Paper doesn't work.