In May, The Globe and Mail, Canada’s #1 weekday and weekend newspaper, unveiled a new iOS app for its readers, creating a dramatically different experience for its digital readers – one that turned out to be disastrous for the 170-year-old media company, says Nieman Lab.

, the goal with the app was to give readers “unparalleled access to news and analysis at key moments of your day in a tightly curated package – from morning briefings and breaking news to in-depth features and interactive storytelling” across multiple platforms.

The Globe’s new app was intended to be simple, streamlined and uncluttered yet still engaging, and to provide a finite reading experience, so readers could feel a sense of completion. The initial version of the app included three sections – Home, Report on Business, and Sports & Culture – with three updates on weekdays and one per day on weekends. Navigation was simplified, allowing readers to swipe right and left to move between stories and sections, and to search for specific topics.

Matt Frehner, senior editor for mobile and interaction news, explained the idea to Nieman Lab: “The philosophy behind the product was: Here’s what you need to know about the day, and here’s some unexpected great content from The Globe.”

But readers didn’t like it. In fact, some hated it and threatened to cancel their subscriptions if The Globe didn’t make dramatic changes – quickly.

One reader commented, “It’s the worst app update ever. Hard to find articles and sections that I normally like to read. Please bring back the old app! This new app is absolutely terrible. I want to be able to see and pick articles to read from the headlines myself from sections I’m interested in. Not what you ‘curate’ for me.”

Another named Todd tweeted his reaction to the new design:

So what went wrong? First, the app was originally scheduled for a fall release, but the launch was accelerated to the spring to get the app out sooner. Perhaps The Globe cut corners to expedite the product launch. Second, readers did not like the “finite” quality The Globe was focused on. Readers felt like they were getting less news and fewer choices.

One commenter, Jessye3814, said, “This update is very disappointing. I like to be able to browse through articles by section and would prefer not to have to use the search engine to find extra articles. The curated content is too sparse, and this update should have been device agnostic.”

A number of readers canceled, or threatened to cancel, their subscriptions unless changes were made or The Globe returned to its original app.

In an interview with Nieman Lab, Kevin Siu, editorial head of digital, said it is important to balance the needs of readers with The Globe’s desire to try new platforms. This means iterative changes based on The Globe’s plan as well as reader feedback.”We realized that readers comes to us for different reasons and those reasons will change over the course of the day, whether they’re sitting down and reading or if they’re quickly checking something during lunch or on their way home during the commute,” said Siu.

“It isn’t going to be one big change to the app, but a bunch of changes that result in an app months from now that will be quite different from the one we initially launched,” he added.

Since the disastrous launch, The Globe has been making changes, while trying to mitigate the damage, and editor-in-chief David Walmsley briefly apologized for the technical bugs. Last Monday The Globe released its first major update with more than 300 changes, including technical fixes and “major improvements content and navigation.”

In terms of stories and content, The Globe has made it easier to access its latest stories, and on the home screen of the app, readers can scan the top headlines and new sections in the Sports and Life & Arts sections. Other updates include links from breaking news alerts directly to the story, account registration via Facebook and Twitter, and the ability to bookmark – or unbookmark – a particular story.

The Globe has also changed its navigation. To read the next article, subscribers will swipe left. To move back to a section or page, they will swipe right. When subscribers return to a given page, the app will remember where they left off.

In the next week or so, another change will serve up personalized headline recommendations to readers based on their reading habits. More information about the specific changes can be found here. Since the major update, only three users have posted comments, none of them positive.

Insider Take:

Based on what we know, it sounds like The Globe created a product it thought its readers wanted, but their initial version of the app was not well received. It’s hard when an organization like The Globe and Mail puts in a lot of time, money and resources into a project only to discover users don’t like it. That’s a hard lesson and a negative experience for any publisher. From the time of initial research to the actual product launch, so many things can go wrong including everything from up-front market testing and consumer input to poor technical infrastructure, user experience and marketing. Much of this is within a publisher’s control, but user feedback is not.

What we don’t know is how The Globe went about the process, so it is hard to say what steps could have been improved along the way. For example, did they talk to readers – subscribers and non-subscribers – to find out what features they most wanted?

As an example, in a recent article, we discussed The McClatchy Company’s recent reinvention. McClatchy did hundreds of hours of interviews with readers to get a clear picture of their readers’ needs. This phase of the project alone took McClatchy months. Did The Globe do this? We aren’t sure if they asked for input on the front end, but they asked for – and received – a lot of feedback after the initial launch.

One area of improvement seems to be transparency. The Globe could have been more open at launch. While its announcement was thorough, how much marketing and education was done prior to launch? Did they explain to readers why they made the changes they did? Did they tell readers that this was only the initial phase of the app, and they were open to feedback? Did The Globe take ownership for its decisions? It doesn’t sound like it, based on Walmsley’s letter to readers claiming 400,000 downloads, or The Globe’s lack of response to hundreds of reader comments.

If The Globe had disclosed more of its process and handled the launch a bit more openly, we think the readers’ revolt would have been tempered somewhat. That said, The Globe still has an opportunity to turn this around by not making excuses and really listening to its readers, making necessary changes, educating readers about those changes, and offering incentives to keep or bring back disgruntled subscribers. Note: We reached out to The Globe’s editor-in-chief last week to get more insight into the process. To date, we have not received a response.

We’ll continue to follow the story to see how readers are responding to the major update, and we’ll update our article if we get the opportunity to speak to management at The Globe and Mail.

Dana Neuts is a Reporter-Contributor for Subscription Insider.