Today, we launched phase one of our new responsive site design, and the changes we’re introducing to GigaOM and paidContent will ensure that doesn’t happen to you here. At a time when readers are using so many different devices, one big challenge for digital publishers is retaining the quality and consistency of the reading experience not only across devices but also across different operating systems and browsers.

Now, whether you’re on a desktop or a laptop, a tablet or a smartphone, our sites will automatically adjust, rendering the content in the way that best fits that particular environment. We know, for example, that it’s harder to hit a target on the page with your finger than with a mouse, and so if you’re reading us on a tablet, we’ve enlarged the target to make it easier to strike. Similarly, rather than try to cram our entire site onto a 4-inch smartphone display, we’ve removed some content from the mobile view so as to focus the presentation of the most essential information. In all cases, the site simply readjusts to fit the real estate on the screen that you’re on at the time.

Below, you can see how the presentation of an actual story changes as the screen shrinks.

Those aren’t the only improvements that we’ve made. Among the other things you’ll notice about GigaOM and paidContent:

• More curation: If you’re time-stretched, our new “Must Reads” section tells you what you absolutely shouldn’t miss.
• Easier sharing: We’ve made it easier to share not only whole stories and also pieces of content within stories.
• Better performance: Because the pages are lighter weight, they will load faster.
• Crisper display: We’ve added blur-resistant icons and new text-size controls, so there’s no more squinting to read text or straining to hit a small target when navigating the site.
• A cleaner look: We’ve ditched a lot of widgets that had simply built up over the years but no longer serve their original purpose.

For phase one of the redesign, we’ve intentionally simplified the look and feel of the site — it’s more akin to updating the plumbing in a house than redoing the facade. But without reliable plumbing, a house isn’t very habitable. These upgrades pave the way for subsequent phases of this redesign over the next few months that will include more changes in how we present our content.

Finally, I wanted to thank the fantastic team that has been slaving away on the redesign for last several months: our head of product management Raza Zaidi; engineers Casey Bisson, Matt Batchelder, Zach Tirrell and Jamie Poitra; designers Stephen Engert, Arlo Jamrog and Jonathan Koshi; and our product guys Adam Kazwell and Ian Kennedy. They’ve worked long hours — and tested countless iterations in QA — and we think the results are great.

We’d love to know what you think. If you have suggestions or comments (positive or negative), please leave them in the comment thread in this post.

Thanks again for being loyal readers.

Images courtesy of PlaceIt by Breezi.

Today, we launched phase one of our new responsive site design, and the changes we’re introducing to paidContent and GigaOM will ensure that doesn’t happen to you here. At a time when readers are using so many different devices, one big challenge for digital publishers is retaining the quality and consistency of the reading experience not only across devices but also across different operating systems and browsers.

Now, whether you’re on a desktop or a laptop, a tablet or a smartphone, our sites will automatically adjust, rendering the content in the way that best fits that particular environment. We know, for example, that it’s harder to hit a target on the page with your finger than with a mouse, and so if you’re reading us on a tablet, we’ve enlarged the target to make it easier to strike. Similarly, rather than try to cram our entire site onto a 4-inch smartphone display, we’ve removed some content from the mobile view so as to focus the presentation of the most essential information. In all cases, the site simply readjusts to fit the real estate on the screen that you’re on at the time.

Below, you can see how the presentation of an actual story changes as the screen shrinks.

Those aren’t the only improvements that we’ve made. Among the other things you’ll notice about paidContent and GigaOM:

• More curation: If you’re time-stretched, our new “Must Reads” section tells you what you absolutely shouldn’t miss.
• Easier sharing: We’ve made it easier to share not only whole stories and also pieces of content within stories.
• Better performance: Because the pages are lighter weight, they will load faster.
• Crisper display: We’ve added blur-resistant icons and new text-size controls, so there’s no more squinting to read text or straining to hit a small target when navigating the site.
• A cleaner look: We’ve ditched a lot of widgets that had simply built up over the years but no longer serve their original purpose.

For phase one of the redesign, we’ve intentionally simplified the look and feel of the site — it’s more akin to updating the plumbing in a house than redoing the facade. But without reliable plumbing, a house isn’t very habitable. These upgrades pave the way for subsequent phases of this redesign over the next few months that will include more changes in how we present our content.

Finally, I wanted to thank the fantastic team that has been slaving away on the redesign for last several months: our head of product management Raza Zaidi; engineers Casey Bisson, Matt Batchelder, Zach Tirrell and Jamie Poitra; designers Stephen Engert, Arlo Jamrog and Jonathan Koshi; and our product guys Adam Kazwell and Ian Kennedy. They’ve worked long hours — and tested countless iterations in QA — and we think the results are great.

We’d love to know what you think. If you have suggestions or comments (positive or negative), please leave them in the comment thread in this post.

Thanks again for being loyal readers.

Images courtesy of PlaceIt by Breezi.

One approach that has gotten a lot of attention, in part because it comes from former Tumblr designer and Instapaper founder Marco Arment, is an online and mobile magazine called simply The Magazine, which launched earlier this month. The simplicity of the name is reflected in the platform itself: Arment’s digital magazine, which is focused on long-form essays about technology and culture, has virtually none of the elements that we’ve come to associate with online or virtual magazines — it has no masthead or sidebars or boxes with interactive ads, no table of contents or sharing buttons or drop-down menus. In fact, it has virtually nothing but words and links (and some cool hyperlinked footnotes).

One of the reasons why The Magazine is able to strip down its reading experience so much is that it has no advertising of any kind: the content is subsidized solely by subscriptions, and Arment said recently that it is already financially sustainable — since it is being produced almost single-handedly, and therefore has an extremely low cost structure compared to traditional publishing. In that sense, it approaches what some have called “artisanal” publishing, and there is some good discussion of the pros and cons of that model in a Branch discussion that includes designer Jon Lax and NYT staffer Jeremy Zilar.

Simplify, simplify, simplify

From a design perspective, however, the simplicity of the app is its most interesting feature, in part because Arment seems to have approached it in a way that is the complete antithesis of traditional publishers: as he has described in his posts about the genesis of the project, he started it by thinking about what elements he really needed, and left everything else out. By contrast, most magazines and newspapers seem to ask themselves “How can we take all the stuff we already have and the things we already do, and squeeze them into this new container?” This process is fundamentally broken.

Designer Craig Mod looked at The Magazine and its design philosophy in a perceptive essay entitled “Subcompact publishing,” in which he compares what Arment did to the way that Honda disrupted the automotive business in North America, by providing something that fit the minimum needs of a large group of consumers. In a similar way, Mod argues, publishers need to stop thinking about all the things they can cram into a design on the web or a mobile device and start thinking about what developers and entrepreneurs call a “minimum viable product.”

“Business skeuomorphism happens when we take business decisions explicitly tied to one medium, and bring them to another medium — no questions asked. Business skeuomorphism is rampant in the publishing industry.”

There are already some great examples of content experiences that are trying for a “minimum viable product.” The Magazine is one, but so are lesser-known or more experimental features such as Evening Edition, which was created by designer Mike Monteiro and provides a heavily-curated selection of news and features designed to give readers an overview of the world in the same way a newspaper front page does (or used to). Another more recent entrant is a news site called TL;DR — internet slang for “too long, didn’t read” — which summarizes top stories in a more approachable way than traditional portals.

Let the content fit the experience, not the other way around

Other similar experiments include Summ.ly, a startup launched by a 16-year-old entrepreneur, which Om wrote about recently. It is also designed in as simple a way as possible, to take advantage of the limited time and screen real estate that mobile users often have when it comes to content consumption — something that is also a driving force behind Circa, the mobile news-aggregation app launched earlier this year by entrepreneur Matt Galligan and funded by Cheezburger empire CEO Ben Huh. And then there is the short-form, mobile reading experience offered by Tapestry, which was recently launched by New York-based incubator Betaworks based on a model pioneered by author Robin Sloan.

It’s worth noting that Twitter is a great example of the “minimum viable product” approach, both as a company and as a way of publishing content: not only is the restriction to 140 characters something that keeps Twitter from becoming cluttered with too much verbiage — the way other formats such as blogs can be — but the whole nature of the service itself was so simplified that in the beginning it wasn’t even clear to many people what it should be used for. That didn’t start to become obvious (even to the company’s founders, I would argue) until millions of people were using it, and even then many of the uses that the tool was put to came as a surprise.

This is part of the reason why some Twitter users are so concerned about the future of the platform, as it adds more content through features like its expandable “Cards” and seems determined to layer more and more functionality on top of the service. With any kind of publishing, there seems to be an almost irresistable temptation to continue adding more features and content and doo-dads until the original simplicity of the experience is lost, or at least significantly diluted.

Why aren’t more traditional publishers experimenting with features or services that are similar to Arment’s magazine, or Tapestry’s mobile approach, or a stripped-down experience like that offered by TL;DR or Circa? It’s not because they can’t — obviously they could if they wanted to. But as Craig Mod suggests in his essay, with reference to disruptive economics guru Clay Christensen, they don’t do this for the same reason North American auto-makers didn’t compete with Honda: they simply didn’t see it as a competitor until it was almost too late, because they had defined their business in the wrong way.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Arvind Grover

The massive growth of a site like Tumblr, which is now bigger than Wikipedia with more than 20 billion pageviews a month (something I have argued should make Facebook more than a little nervous) is even more spectacular when you consider the fact that David Karp — who designed a prototype of the service when he was just 19 — didn’t have any intention of creating a gigantic web company that would one day be valued at close to $1 billion and have over 160 million users.

Create something you want or need

As the Tumblr founder said in our interview, all he really wanted was a tool that he could use to post images and thoughts online. There were image-hosting services like Flickr and micro-blogging networks like Twitter and full-fledged blog platforms like WordPress, but nothing that fit what Karp was looking for or was as easy to use as he wanted. So he built it. A number of other founders at RoadMap echoed that sentiment: build something to fill a need that you have, and if you are lucky then lots of other people will have a similar need, and you will have a useful service.

So what is the takeaway for media companies? It’s fine to say that an entrepreneur should focus on filling a need that they have themselves, but where does that leave a traditional media player? You can’t just redesign a newspaper or a newspaper company from scratch (although people like John Paton of Digital First Media and Guardian editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger are certainly trying hard to do so anyway).

What I think you can do, however, is to think about who your user is and what they want, both when it comes to your traditional product (i.e. a newspaper or magazine) and your digital services or products. This isn’t something most media companies are particularly adept at, just as thinking like a startup and focusing on innovation is a struggle for many — in the past, media companies just pumped out content and more or less relied on captive audiences to subscribe to or consume that content, without thinking a lot about what they wanted from it or how they wanted to consume it.

That’s the kind of thinking that results in me-too digital apps that repackage print content with a few digital bells-and-whistles, rather than really trying to understand what users want when it comes to news or other forms of content on a mobile device. And one of my criticisms of the rush to paywalls is that they don’t allow newspapers to really get to know their readers likes and dislikes.

Who are your users and what do they want?

For an example of the opposite, all you have to do is look at what Marco Arment — a designer who used to work at Tumblr and also runs a service called Instapaper — has done with The Magazine, a digital-only and mobile-only editorial product that he launched recently. There are virtually none of the trappings of a digital magazine that has been ported over from the print world, for the simple reason that Arment created it to be digital-native. And it is almost an artisanal approach to editorial content, since he picks the writers and edits it himself, to fill a need that he felt existed in the market.

Another good example of thinking outside the usual boxes is Circa, which Matt Galligan and Cheezburger Network CEO Ben Huh (who was trained as a journalist before he got into the web-humor business) started as a way to provide news in a different format that works better on mobile — as a series of edited summaries of stories rather than the usual repurposed print or web content. Whether users respond to this idea or not remains to be seen, but at least it is trying to reimagine how we interact with content in a mobile age, and it is looking carefully at what users actually do with it.

Most traditional media companies are happy doing surveys of readers so they can target them better for advertising, but how often do they actually think about — or ask — what those readers really want when it comes to their product? Have they thought as hard about the features as David Karp did when he decided to replace comments with the reblog button? Or are they just pumping out the same kind of content and putting it in slightly different packages and hoping that it works?

Getting to know their readers (or users) better, and understanding exactly what they want and don’t want, isn’t just something that would be helpful for media companies to figure out — it could be the only thing that is standing between them and extinction.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users George Kelly and Zert Sonstige