In an era where the smartphone’s ubiquity reshapes how we interact with digital content, Karen McGrane’s insights on building for a mobile audience stand as a beacon for organisations striving to adapt.

McGrane, partner at Autogram, and other media leaders from NTM, The Texas Tribune, and Holland Media shared invaluable lessons on the transformation towards mobile-first content strategy during the Mobile-First News Sites master class, recently organised as part of INMA’s Product and Tech Initiative.

Highlighting the critical importance of the mobile Web, McGrane criticised the prevalent practice of relegating it to a secondary status behind desktop experiences and native apps. She urged organisations to make the mobile Web experience as enriching and engaging as any app or desktop site, dispelling the myth that apps inherently offer a superior user experience: “It matters even more now than ever.”

Despite the proliferation of apps, she asserts the mobile Web remains a crucial platform for user engagement. The neglect of the mobile Web experience, McGrane warns, can alienate users and diminish brand reputation. Investing in the mobile Web is not just about keeping up with technological trends but about respecting and valuing the user experience.

“What we need to do is put in the effort and to make the mobile Web great,” McGrane said. “And yet, alas, too many organisations seem to think that they can annoy and harass their users into downloading the app.”

NTM reinvents the mobile site

When NTM in Stockholm, Sweden, needed to reinvent its mobile site, it assembled a five-person cross-disciplinary team in a small room with lots of coffee. Two days later, the team emerged with a mapped out minimum viable product and managed to get that idea from the whiteboard to the mobile screen in just four weeks.

Jens Pettersson, head of editorial development at NTM, said the process began by looking at what existing products they liked to inspire them.

The team reinvented the site’s front page, introducing a clean interface that focused on the news and simplified navigation: “We moved [navigation] to the bottom and [made it] easier to access the latest news and the navigation,” he said. “We also changed the format for the pictures and made them a bit less high, so we created more of a news density feeling on this.”

With the new mobile site ready to go, Pettersson said the team fully expected an initial drop in traffic: “My experience from doing this kind of manoeuvres before has been that as soon as you try to move stuff on a Web site, you get drops in traffic and people can’t really find their way.”

However, that was not the case with the new mobile site.

Pageviews of the Latest News section increased by 102%, and readership on the highest-priority headlines increased by 53%. Headlines further down on the page saw even better results, Pettersson: “Slot number four increased by 102%, and slot number eight further down on this front page actually increased by 322%.”

Texas Tribune kills the iOS app

In 2009, The Texas Tribune secured its reputation as a digital innovator by launching as a digital-only Web site covering politics and policy in Texas. While it had a Web site, mobile Web, and iOS app, they were riddled with problems ranging from sluggish loading times to the app crashing every time the operating system updated.

It was time to kill the iOS app, Rodney Gibbs, who was the start-up’s first chief product officer, said. But that wasn’t going to be easy.

A cost-benefit analysis showed the expense of maintaining a mobile Web was far less than working on an iOS app, and it also would give the sales team new opportunities to present sponsorships.

“We realised if we had more focus and could iterate faster on the mobile Web, we had a much higher chance of winning more business and bringing in more revenue on that,” Gibbs said.

It was then that the team borrowed a process from Amazon called working backward. Before it starts a major product initiative, Amazon writes a press release as if it is completed explaining what it does and what problems it solves. That helps the company envision the end state and make sure it does everything it needs to do.

“So we did the working backwards [and] said, what if we had this end state where iOS was gone, but we had a mobile Web that was super-fast that we could iterate on, that we could be opportunistic when opportunities came up and we could really make it soar?”

The effort paid off. One year later, mobile usage was up more than 15%, and load times dropped. Search traffic increased, and, importantly, walls between departments were broken down, creating cross-departmental collaboration.

“And we really hit some of those strategic goals about attracting new users, making it easier for them to join us and speed up the product innovation,” Gibbs said. “So it fortified our impression as an innovator.”

Holland Media shifts from desktop-first

As more and more people rely on their phones to read the news, the need for a mobile first media market grows. Media outlets and publishers have to adapt to this changing landscape, or they risk getting left behind.

“We didn’t realise how many of our readers are reading stories on a mobile phone,” GerBen van’t Hek, group director of Holland Media, said. “We’re now up to 88% of our stories read on the mobile phone, especially on the app but also our Web audience.”

Yet, in spite of this, they were still focusing their digital stories on desktop readers. Photos, infographics, the layout of the page — all of it was being tailored to desktop readers.

Headline testing, redesigned graphics, and even having staff turn their screens vertically helped push the mobile-first strategy, but it was not enough.

“We have to reorganise our entire workflow,” van’t Hek said. “Mobile thinking has to be No. 1 in every step that we take. Are we talking about the newsletters? We have to do the mobile versions first. Are we creating stock photos for our stock photo library? We have to create mobile first.”

For van’t Hek’s newsroom, this change in workflow looks like changes in their CMS with M-preview, or a new mobile Web site, new enrichment tools, all with a portrait focus. Everything that gets redesigned is done with a focus on the mobile Web site first, everything is designed around the mobile Web site.

In short, they based everything on the data, and not opinions.

Among the data that informed his media outlet’s decisions was information on what sites people were coming from. Facebook, Google, Twitter — traffic from all of these sites informed how they began to prioritise the article itself as the “main entrance” for readers. They received 1.1 pageviews per session, something they’re hoping to increase.

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