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.

A Complete "Love" Affair

So after many tears and screaming at an unresponsive, ironically named, "responsive" web page, I flung my hands in the air, and yelled "YES!", signaling the near end of my trauma. In short, Duke's web page is complete and working in Firefox, Internet Explorer and Google Chrome.

I am happy with the way it looks expect for a few minor issues which should be sorted before the dust settles on this post. I struggled tremendously with understanding the Javascript code and more often than not, felt as dumbed down as the illness I had at the beginning of term caused me to be. The side effects of my confusion may be evident in the order of the code( which I tried to make as coherent/sound as possible) but ultimately, the functions used to SAVE an image and to APPEND kind of got the better of me in the end.

My site name "Ngiyakuthanda" means "I love you" and I felt tied in with the theme of the web page. The use of a gallery showcasing various zulu love letters also reinforces the write-up. The color choices are eye-catching and bright; just as African people are, and those of you who saw my first web page when we began this course will know, I'm in love with the diversity of Africa and all things African.
I find fluid grid layout exciting and am hopeful about the possibilities it presents for our SRP project in terms of mobile devices and catering for them. I have learnt a great deal, with a huge amount of effort and thank Duke for being patient with us. I am pretty certain that responsive web design is something I am going to try and become expert in because it is so relevant for keeping up with current technological advancements.

Check out my site here and don't be afraid to comment either :)
http://mendilab.co.za/FAM3007F/2012/slmdia001/zulu-love-letter/

Enjoy the vac everyone!
D

Assignment1: Zulu Love Letter Rationale

By definition, a Zulu Love letter is an African beaded message created by Zulu maidens for their lovers to symbolize their affections, using various colored beads, each with a different meaning. The assignment places emphasis on the requirements and capabilities of the Zulu Love letter on a mobile platform, whether it be on a smartphone or a tablet device. The Zulu Love Letter will appear on a single web page and will stand out due to the interactivity it will offer the user.  Interactivity will be possible through the use of Javascript coding to bring each individual bead to life, taking into consideration the size of each bead and the number of beads per column and row for efficient coding. Javascript

The aforementioned requirements for this interactive web page magazine, work on 3 levels, namely, functional (what people want to do with the web page and designing around meeting those needs), technical (which incorporates considering things like Java support on the mobile device) and finally, considering the user.  The use of the fast-becoming-popular, HTML 5 which has its own set of capabilities, and is more powerful when Javascript is used to detect these capabilities, falls under the requirements. This is under the assumption that most devices nowadays (not considering ancient mobile devices) are able to support Javascript. The use of CSS3, an-up-to-date, and powerful means with which to use media queries to, for example, style the web page, along with the Javascript <canvas> element to create the beads’ interactive abilities, are also key requirements. CSS3 is great because it assists in optimization of the mobile site to make it significantly responsive.

A magazine article - text relevant to the Zulu Love letter might be appropriate here, perhaps giving in-depth explication of what a Zulu Love Letter is, what the colors signify, meaning of the pattern created therein, and how it was created on said site - must be included. The word count of the article is not necessary but definite consideration must be taken in this regard as nobody is keen to engage in a long scroll-down string of text. It may cause users to lose interest. This site should use an image or images in a slideshow perhaps, to generate interest and up the interactivity aspect for user.  However, not all devices will be able to support this slideshow feature. Other constraints such as the size of the screen per device and the speed of the network – smaller apps are better since they make the device operate faster, must be considered.

The capabilities mentioned above relate to what can be done on the various mobile devices regarding this mobile magazine.  Touch, which is the use of the finger to flick, pinch, tap or double tap, press or rotate, is a nifty capability which would be great for making the experience more intuitive for the user. Perhaps using this to enable the user to create the Zulu Love Letter would be an awesome way to truly engage the user. The use of innovations such as Wifi or Bluetooth for users to perhaps send each other  (share) the Zulu Love Letter is worth considering. It all seems challenging but quite exciting in the greater scheme of things.