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What publishers need to do to build great mobile products

Building a great mobile experience requires organisations to transform their thinking to “focus on users, rather than devices”.

12th April 2024

With the majority of many publishers' digital users coming from mobile, we look at how they can reorient their approach to mobile first. Photo by Becca Tapert on Unsplash

According to data from SemRush, the world’s most highly trafficked news sites get anywhere from 70-90% of their traffic from mobile devices. However, it is still common to come across mobile sites that lack the quality of a desktop site. Moreover, research has shown that poor mobile sites are the highest driver of churn. Conversely, mobile apps, with their superior user experience, are just the opposite and deliver the highest retention rates. To address these issues, INMA recently conducted a masterclass focused on building better mobile-first websites. Broadly, the themes were:

Focus on the user, not the device.
Establish key metrics to deliver this.

Become user first, not device first

During the webinar, Karen McGrane, partner at content management-focused consultancy Autogram, pointed out that one of the key mistakes publishers make when designing for mobile audiences is to focus on the device, rather than users and their experiences. A device-centric approach often results in the incorrect framing of the issues. It introduces “all kinds of biases” which obscure the conditions that matter, namely, the size of the screen the user is looking at and whether they interact with the product by clicking a mouse or tapping a screen. In our experience, this can also create a discrepancy between experiences on iOS and Android with one being prioritised over the other.

Moreover, as anyone who has looked at a news publisher’s digital analytics will know, users follow numerous pathways to a news site. And the paths audiences take to your site – mobile or desktop – have shifted over time. In the early days of digital media, the homepage journey got the most attention. That emphasis shifted during the Platform Era, with publishers focused on sideways traffic from search and social directly to article pages. As Christopher Chester, Senior Product Designer at The Atlantic pointed out during the webinar, an “article page may actually be your homepage”. Publishers should consider what users see when they first land on an article. Do they have enough information to understand the brand and the product offering? However, with the end of the Platform Era, publishers have shifted their focus back to direct traffic, often to the homepage.

Our advice is to look at your analytics and see how much of your traffic goes to your homepage, either on mobile or desktop. It’s a balance, and your audience may behave differently. And for mobile audiences, it is worth remembering that social sharing is only one pathway for mobile audiences to your site. Hopefully, mobile audiences are also sharing your content with friends via mobile messaging, whether that is via native mobile messaging or WhatsApp and Telegram.

It is also worth remembering that many users often skim your homepage or home timeline in your app, which we see in the data we have across hundreds of apps. They want a quick scan of the headlines, which may be enough. Then the challenge becomes how to engage them more deeply with your content so that they are more engaged and might buy or renew their subscription.

Furthermore, it is useful to view audiences through other lenses – new versus returning visitors as well as recency and frequency. Almost all news publishers have a significant proportion of visitors that arrive once and never return. Often framed as a traffic acquisition problem, it should also be considered as a product issue. Article pages or other pages where users begin their journey should be reframed to offer not just the content the user is looking for but also act as an entry point to your wider offering so that they become more successful in retaining users.

Focus on user experience

Of course, one of the major shifts in publishing over the last decade has been to reduce reliance on advertising as a source of revenue. The importance of this shift has been emphasised over the past several years due to volatility in ad revenue during the pandemic and falling returns from advertising that have destabilised some publishing sectors.

For these reasons, it is unsurprising that one of the primary areas of discussion during the masterclass was how to balance ad visibility and overall content experience. Sasha Heroy, Executive Product Director, at The New York Times, stated that framing of the problem has traditionally been wrong. Product-focused staff in publishing organisations tend to see advertising coming at the expense of UX, but for Sasha, this isn’t the case. Improving UX on the site will deepen a user’s digital engagement and ultimately will provide more opportunities for advertising.

Despite this thinking, we can all point to some publishers’ sites that prioritise advertising which gets in the way of the content. This is usually done by publishers whose revenue predominantly comes from advertising so they are focused on driving as many ad impressions on each page as possible. Their sites, desktop and mobile, are cluttered with pop-ups, pop-unders, wraps and those horrible ads that appear annoyingly in the middle of stories, shifting what you’re reading or viewing.

However, some publishers have taken the opposite approach. For example, The Athletic offers no advertising and instead focuses on using the product experience to engage, convert and retain subscribers. However, for most, removing advertising entirely is not a viable option as subscriptions alone will not support their business, and they need to find ways to monetise screen views, especially from unsubscribed audiences.

Louise Robertson Associate Director of Product Design at the FT developed this further when she highlighted the difference between desktop and mobile user experience. Louise pointed out that the most important thing to consider is the moment in their day users are looking at their mobile devices. Mobile usage will often occur when people are “filling time or multitasking” and this is significantly different to desktop users who will be more likely to have more time and focus to consume content in more detailed formats. This means that users on a mobile are more likely to require easily consumed, up-to-date information. The contexts are different so formats and how the content is presented need to be as well.

Given the importance of the context of mobile audiences when they are trying to access content, information must be delivered quickly. Therefore, site speed is often mentioned as a vital KPI for the mobile experience. However, Conde Nast’s VP of Product, Noah Robischon pointed out that there is a limit on the importance of site speed and that, in his experience, there are diminishing returns for efforts to make the mobile site faster. Noah observed when looking at Conde’s core web vitals that there are limits to how quickly mobile content can be delivered and suggested that the effort should be to reach a “cap” after which “incremental improvements don’t have a lot of impact”.

In our experience, one of the best ways to improve speed is to look at third-party integrations on your site which slow down page load times. However, this wasn’t the case at Conde and Noah didn’t notice an improvement when they cleaned up scripts. This is surprising, but taking Noah’s approach to analysing core web vitals is generally the best starting point for working out what specifically is slowing down the load time of a mobile site.

The importance of an app

However, whilst the INMA masterclass focused on the mobile web experience, it missed an important means to improve mobile engagement: apps. At Pugpig we see the app as a central component of the digital experience. Mobile websites are still too often rooted in a desktop paradigm, whereas apps are mobile native experiences by design. Moreover, apps offer customisation options and other mobile-only features independent of the desktop experience. Push notifications with deeplinks directly to articles and features of your app like digital editions are a powerful way to draw audiences directly into your content in a way unique to apps, even when users aren’t directly focused on their mobile phones.

Traditionally apps were seen as a subscriber-only product. Increasingly, we see publishers use them to build engagement with their unknown audience with a registration-leading-to-subscription flow, which allows them to move apps further up their conversion funnels. Our suggestion to publishers is to ensure that the mobile web experience is as optimal as possible, but to drive a deeper level of engagement, it needs to work alongside the mobile app.

Jodie’s three key takeaways

With such a deep emphasis on the desktop experience, the masterclass worked to answer how organisations can transform to become mobile-first. Jodie Hopperton from INMA had some excellent suggestions that fit into three themes:

Use your mobile. “If you are talking about mobile products in a meeting, every laptop in the room should be closed”. Demo things on mobile rather than explaining them, “show don’t tell”. Jodie highlights Mediahuis as an example, where their “CMS system now shows journalists what their content looks like on mobile as they are writing it”.
Establish KPIs up front. She uses the example of Relevo who developed their own metrics to balance swipes and clicks but individual metrics aren’t as important as agreeing on what to measure.
Get the right people in the room. Jens Pettersson of NTM told attendees that their motto is “Fight and unite!” Fight about the product up front and then unite once you have reached agreement. Differing points of views in the discovery and design process make for a better overall product.

A great mobile experience will be most easily built by changing workplace culture and product focus away from one that revolves around laptops and mobile phones and instead focusing on how users access your content. Ultimately, it is about understanding users, their needs and their contexts, to drive the best user experience for users regardless of device and what they are doing when they find your content.

Pugpig is full of mobile app experts who can talk to you about various elements of your mobile strategy including your app, content and revenue strategies. If you’d like to speak with us, respond to this email or set up a meeting using this calendar link.

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