CRAFTING A MOBILE MAGAZINE EXPERIENCE

Print magazine articles tend to have complex layouts, and displaying them on small mobile screens is a tough design challenge. Grio’s designers collaborated with NIM to create a consistent, streamlined mobile template that provides a great reading experience on any device, while NIM’s developers worked in parallel to build a series of rapid prototypes based on the templated designs.

Our first task was to thoroughly analyze both the design problem and the competitive space. The research phase included a deep analysis of magazine article layouts across a wide range of publications, and detailed documentation of the patterns and editorial design elements we observed. We also reviewed ten competitor products to better understand existing mobile-optimized article viewing solutions.

Armed with a clear understanding of the article elements we needed to accommodate, Grio’s design team dove into each element and crafted a streamlined template whose many moving parts worked cohesively together. We delivered the HTML/CSS template to NIM’s development team, who injected Javascript to add interactivity as specified by our designs.

Following implementation of the new template, Texture was rated one of the best apps of 2016, and the NIM team observed a 30% increase in article opens and time spent on article pages among mobile users. Grio continues to work with NIM to provide services that complement their design and development skills, and to offset an increasing workload as their business grows.