A new look for The Globe’s mobile website
Almost every week of the year, The Globe and Mail updates its digital products (desktop/mobile web, newsletters, and more) with new features, designs and bug fixes. Here’s where you’ll see changes this week.
Mobile Web
Today we’re introducing some fairly significant changes to the look and feel of The Globe’s mobile website.
Some of our readers might recognize this design: We have been testing versions of it for a few months now. It is representative of our test-and-learn design philosophy for evolving our digital properties (more on that below).
Here’s a look at what’s new:
Section pages
We’ve updated the font on the homepage to match our other publications and added a bit more room between them to improve the reading experience. We’ve also increased the size of the different section headings as you scan down the homepage.
Also, links to stories you’ve already read will appear in grey, to help you see what’s new at a glance.
The banner
The red banner at the top has a new look and will stay in view as you scroll down the list of headlines.
Tapping the menu icon will open up the list of sections rather than sending you to the bottom of the page.
Magnifying glasses are useful for bringing a swift but painful end to ants on the sidewalk on a sunny day. Our magnifying glass can only be used for good: opening up an improved search prompt.
Articles
The main changes here have to do with the typography:
We’ve matched the headline and details fonts to our other publications, and tried to improve the reading experience with a bit more spacing in the main text of the article. The default size for the article text is also larger than it used to be.
How our process works
We start by understanding the needs of our readers. We do this through surveys, product feedback and continual analysis of our website traffic.
Then we design improvements with those needs in mind. Next we build a small prototype and test it with real people. We typically show it to a small percentage of our readers and measure how well they interact with it to determine its success. If it performs well we release it to everyone, like this one.
We will be continuing to test improvements to our websites over the next several months and we are very interested in hearing your feedback. If you would like to be part of a group of readers that provides design feedback then please visit our Facebook page and request an invite.
We’re always interested to hear what you think. Tell us in the comments or contact our Mobile team with your feedback at mobile@globeandmail.com.
