The Impact of White Space on User Experience for Tablet Editions of Magazines

As magazine publishing emerges into the digital world, it needs to achieve the degree of readers' desire that is comparable to or surpassing print publications. As a result, designers and publishers for digital magazines must create well-designed magazines that attract more readers.

We are moving into the digital arena, which is a new revolution for transferring the design from the printing platform to the digital platform. Essentially, the manifold technologies, operating systems, screen sizes, and resolutions impose the concern for publishers seeking a reference. Therefore, it is necessary to develop a guideline for designing digital magazines which will help magazine publishing industry to achieve scale and profitability. In this paper, the researchers focused on one of the design elements: white space. The aim of the present study is to investigate how user experience is affected by white space in the layout of digital editions of food magazines designed for a tablet, such as an iPad. The food magazines were chosen because the life style magazines, and specifically the food magazine category, is the fastest growing genre for digital magazine publishing (Bazilian, 2013).