News websites need to adapt content for mobile users

I’ve been thinking about this for last couple of years, ever since I worked at MediaNama.com. News reading experience on mobile is really crap.

News websites have slowly managed to make their websites responsive, that is, you no longer need to horizontally scroll to read news. That seems to be their definition for a responsive website. It doesn’t take into account whether the reader has a good experience visiting the mobile site. Many a times, not. This is one of the reason why newsreaders prefer to read news on apps than to visit a site.

Having said that, I do not feel that apps are providing an optimised experience as well.

When you go mobile, you altogether need to change the type of content you serve. For example, you don’t post pics taken from DSLR on Instagram. You don’t post blogposts on Twitter, although many have taken to tweetstorms to do that, yet essentially they are not blogposts. Most of the content posted on these new age mobile apps are consumed on mobile. Then why do news websites hope that it’s okay to serve the same content on mobile that they serve through their websites on desktops?

If there’s one thing to take away from mobile apps, it’s that people like to consume bite sized information when on mobile. And rightly so, you shouldn’t have to read a research paper on your mobile.

When I started DMN (digital media news) newsletter back in 2013, which provided snippets of news in Digital and Media sector, I did it over email as a newsletter. I quickly realised that mobile users rely on bite sized information on mobile devices and that the format best suited for mobile screen. It took me a longer, but I’ve launched a mobile app — TheDigest — on Android OS. And the response has been overwhelming. A lot of people love how we present curated news — short and swift.

I’m not done experimenting yet though. Hope to take this further and inspire other digital media outlets to adopt the format. I’m happy to help if any digital news media outlet wants to figure out how to adopt their content for mobile platform. Contact me at unitechy@gmail.com.

You can download TheDigest from Google PlayStore.

This post originally appeared on my personal blog