How much of Wolfgang Blau’s “office desktop” traffic will survive for brands like the Mirror?
by Martin Belam, August 1, 2014 Wolfgang Blau, director of digital strategy at the Guardian, recently tweeted about the shift to mobile apparent in news consumption over the last couple of years. He posed a challenging question – are we de-prioritising desktop design too soon?
His argument is that the 9-5 office desktop culture is too strong at the moment to be designing sites that don’t work well for desktop. Joshua Benton wrote up some of the ensuing debate for the Nieman Jornalism Lab.
I think it is a good question. Some brands – perhaps those with more business-oriented content like the FT and the Guardian – may retain that daytime desktop audience for longer. And obviously, I’d never deliberately design something to be bad.
But I am firmly of the opinion that where you have to make a business choice today for time/cost reasons, you should be treating desktop as the second-class citizen. And mobile as the first-class citizen.
Why do I think that?
July has been the first month where every hour of every day Mirror.co.uk’s mobile traffic has been larger than its desktop traffic.
by Martin Belam, August 1, 2014 I do live blogging, news stories and quizzes at the Guardian, and help cover Eurovision and Doctor Who for them too. As a journalist and designer I’ve spent over twenty years building digital products for the likes of Sony, the Guardian, the BBC, the Natural History Museum, Arts Council England and Reach (formerly Trinity Mirror). You can contact me at martin.belam@theguardian.com. Sign up to get my blog posts sent to you via email.
Wow, what a “only among journalists with their heads up certain places” discussion.
Blau makes a somewhat interesting but not particularly actionable point about assumptions in the decline of desktop traffic.
Then Benton, in a typically Benton-esque stretch, asks “is desktop sometimes being abandoned too quickly?” “Abandoned”? What does “abandoned” even mean? According to Benton, I guess, sites that “look kinda bad on bigger screens.”
If that’s the case, it’s not the “abandonment of desktop” but what I like to call “crappy design.” Or, as Martin Belam once said (mere paragraphs ago), “I’d never deliberately design something to be bad.”
In the hypothetical world where a gun is put to one’s head and the trigger man says “quick – bad mobile site or bad desktop site” yes, I’d got with “bad mobile.” But it’s a choice no-one needs to make.
Hi Martin,
Yes, same here at the Guardian: we first rebuilt our mobile site and from there went on to building the new desktop site which we are still working on. In that sequence. The internal agreement in this project is that – where possible -we also want to cater to desktop-specific user behaviour, but never at the cost of the mobile experience.
Wolfgang
It is also a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you create a great mobile site more people will use it. The more people use it the more important it becomes to your organisation, the better you make it and the more influence the platform has.