We recently wrapped up our master class on mobile-first news Web sites, and I want to take you through some of the learnings. With over 7.5 hours of programming and 12 speakers, it’s impossible to do justice to the full deep dive, but there were certainly learnings across the presentations.

One big one: In the opening keynote, I found out that I had the title of the “mobile-first news sites” all wrong. 

Karen McGrane of Autogram told us that rather than device name, which can carry all kinds of biases, we should think about the conditions first: screen size, whether it’s touch screen or mouse. Louise Robertson of the FT further enforced this thinking by thinking about the wider context of the user when they use small screens. Often people are filing time or multitasking, and they expect up-to-date information.

Karen also reminded us that user experience comes first. Specifically she told us: “You can’t annoy your way to success” when talking about pop-ups. As a consumer, I couldn’t agree more. Asking me for something when I haven’t even had 10 seconds to review what I came for is not going to get a welcome response. 

Improving experience over prioritising ad visibility is better for users, advertisers and, as Sasha Heroy of The New York Times pointed out, overall revenue. 

Taking into account the conditions of a visit, we also realise the article page may actually be your homepage. Think about the context, or lack of, that users are coming with to your brand. Consideration of user journeys is essential, as Christopher Chester of The Atlantic so eloquently showed us in the slide below.

Consumer expectations also feed into the conditions surrounding our products. 

Speed came up as one of the biggest things that needed fixing amongst our attendees. It has a huge impact on consumer experience and on SEO.

Balancing the need for speed with ensuring your site is up to date can be a challenge. During the “core Web vitals checkup,” Noah Robischon of Condé Nast shared that longer cache times of four hours made a real difference to site speed, but only if editors can break through this for news stories with an optional purge. 

He also shared that there is a cap on speed. Once it’s good, the incremental improvements don’t have a lot of impact. And I was surprised that an audit of third-party scripts found tidying them up doesn’t always make a significant difference. 

Thinking about all of these conditions and how our users actually use mobiles, I have seen no better example of putting all this into practice than Relevo by Vocento. Granted, they have the luxury of being a new brand so have started mobile rather than iterating a long existing brand, which is a totally different beast. 

But look at the screenshots below. Consider how they think about headlines for fast swiping to see what’s of interest, then leading to slow reading when there is a spark of interest. And perhaps even more: They recognise the majority of their readers come via mobile so their desktop version is an enhanced version of mobile. They have used the extra screen size to incorporate additional features for the desktop version of their product.

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