Great Big Story

BIG STORIES IN BITE-SIZED PIECES. Free | www.greatbigstory.com

Great Big Story is a hub of video narratives, updated daily. With channels ranging from ‘Human Condition’ to ‘Planet Earth’, you’re sure to find something to interest you. We first watched a one-minute video about a rare and beautiful lemur (see above), then took a walk through the Amazon to find a boiling river, then had a brief tour through an old hotel before ending up in a haunted house. Each video is only a few minutes long and all are professionally produced. As well as channels, you can also pick a curated playlist.

The first thing you will want to do is turn off the auto-play feature, but finding the settings tab took quite a while. (At the end of the playlists menu for some reason...) Also, if you exit a video before it’s finished, it will continue in a small thumbnail on the bottom right of your screen, which got annoying very quickly. We also found it vexing that there was no ‘back’ button (at least in the iOS version), meaning that you have to navigate back to the main menu a lot. A simple swipe from left to right would have been great to complement the otherwise clean interface. Handily, you can flag videos to watch later, though.

With a bit more work on the UX, this would be a really great app.