Strategies Magazines Use to Adapt to the Mobile Era

In a day and age where people are constantly on the go, individuals have become increasingly reliant on info on-the-go, as opposed to physically being confined to their chairs in front of a desktop or television.  Whether magazines display on mobile devices as scanned images embedded in a Flash object which can be navigated like a physical magazine, or as responsive web pages, there is a general expectation that magazines that are trendy, tech savvy and forward-thinking, will be available on multiple platforms. This is a valid expectation for magazines to embrace the mobile era, considering how doing so can broaden their target markets, thus raising their notoriety and increasing their sales via online subscriptions.

But adapting to mobile requires implementation of carefully planned strategies.  Whether they be through creating a unique mobile application, a dedicated mobile site, through adaptive layouts, or tweaks, users expect a funtional and easy to navigate platform, especially since iOS and Android offer mobile browser support similar to that on desktops. People want to be able to fill out forms sithout facing stumbling blocks because the developers did not take into consideration the fact that connectionas are slow, mobile screens are smaller,  or text is problematic, and therefore did not think to use check boxes, select menus or lists or radio buttons as opposed to text fields.  Anything to make inputing info easier and quicker. This is a key issue if magazines do not consider that their physical magazines are very different from their virtual counterpart. Considerations must also be made for email newsletter design on mobiles to increase viewer readability. Things like adjusting the viewport and text size while taking into consideration that downloads of things like stylesheets can slow the process and result in a bad user experience.

Adaptive layout uses media queries with modern devices able to query things like device width and height, orientation, touch, and much more. Ofcourse, source order in the mark-up should be impeccable, for content to display in the proper order. Scalability must be considered for adapting to different layouts. This is cheap in terms of adapting an online magazine’s content because only minimal additional design is required. However, older mobile browsers (including Internet explorer 8) do not support media queries thus excluding customers in this bracket. Also, images can render slower when the content in HTML is downloading, also because of low bandwidth in Africa than overseas.

Creating an altogether new dedicated mobile website version of the magazine is more ideal but a micro website will cost more money to build since they reside on their own domain or sub-domain (for example ‘magazine.mobi’ or ‘mobile.magazine.com’). Ensuring that visitors are redirected to the dedicated website correctly (with option to view the full site version) and keeping assets such as images to a minimum, will improve performance in terms of quickness and will attract  more consumers because of this appeal. However, maintaining the micro site (in terms of optimizing assets and adapting content) can be expensive for a magazine, and if not designed well, can throw customers off if the design is too different from the full version(desktop).

Applications/Apps for example are great to consider for a mobile magazine since they offer search functionality, sort and filter UI design and apps are a n increasingly popular mobile development trend. They are popular because they are scalable, work cross platform and are a more affordable option. An app is also a handy when refining the data the customers are after. For apps to be effective though, magazines will definetly need to invest in a public relations marketing campaign and creative narratives around hot news, also perhaps running contests to promote it. Apps are valuable because they offer users a more streamlined journey and they use native device controls. They also offer better perfomance and speed as they are lightweight and rely on minimal bandwidth. The tricky things when considering apps include, again, ease of use, easy setup for customer and must have some value to the customer through visual appeal or personal connection. Apps on the downside, require pre-approval from a third party and their creation and maintainence, like a micro site, is costly.

Magazines therefore have decisions to make with the options available in order to keep moving with the times, embracing the smartphone and tablet era to attract a wider customer base and cater to existing customers.