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Huffington Post unveils new design, following mobile test


Huffington Post did a full overhaul of its mobile site, and has decided to bring these successful measures to its desktop site as well. The new upfront design features fewer columns crammed together, and promotes more of a following atmosphere, which can create a more seamless experience for consumers. 

"We have designed this new site with the needs of the mobile user as our North Star," said Mike Treff, ?managing partner of product design group at Code and Theory, the developer behind the design. "For one thing, the entire redesign is mobile-optimized. 

"The experience is crafted around the ways in which readers interact with content today, so we optimized everything for skimming quick information, then diving deep when you target something that piques your interest," he said. "That in itself will be a major improvement on the new site. 

"The rise of mobile has given way to an expectation of 24/7 immediacy and novelty. Luckily, The Huffington Post, with the unprecedented scale of its blogger and reader network and its history as a digital-first publisher, was well-positioned to match these expectations with an incredible speed of publishing and rate of change on its site."

Redesign

The publication updated its mobile site in May, teasing the brands entire digital overhaul to come in 2016. Team members unveiled the look and feel of the new publication during this year?s Ad Week. 

As mobile has evolved how consumers digest content as a whole, the endeavor was designed with mobile-first mindset. The new publication is aimed to fit into consumer love of snackable content. 

Readers will be able to skim through content, just as easily as they do on mobile with the new Web site. 

From the backend portion of the site, editors are now able to publish content much faster and from anywhere. This is important as consumers are now searching for more content, and are conditioned to expect a bevy of on-demand like content. 


The Huffington Post sees 50 percent of its global traffic through mobile, and chose to take the elements its mobile success and format it for desktop. The strategy follows a notion in the industry, in which marketers should design digital efforts for the smaller screen first and expand to desktop after. 

Many marketers have seen success in develop properties and experiences for mobile and then expanding to desktop, as shrinking desktop formats to fit the smaller screen have proven to be ineffective. 

Huffington Post is a digital-only publication, which makes its evolution more important. Technology and consumer behavior have shaped common designs, and it is important that marketers stay on top of that shift. 

Developers for Huffington Post focuses highly on ?performance over pretty,? citing the necessity to lose a font designers had admired due to the fact that it bogged down load time. 

Huffington post hilarity 
The publisher and Funny or Die partnered with social content exchange platform Heard to create their own channels and deliver content to groups of users who share similar interests (see more). 

Also, in a reflection of mobile native advertising?s potential outside of Facebook, Reckitt Benckiser's Lysol recently ran a campaign on the Huffington Post news feed on mobile that delivered relevant content across several areas of interest, introduces a new product and features a wealth of engaging visuals as well as quizzes yet is easy to navigate (see more). 

"We also explored the nature of mobile content consumption, recognizing the intimacy associated with personal mobile devices," Mr. Treff said. "That informed our desire to personalize and tailor the mobile experience. 

"In regards to content creation, the mobile phone has given us the ability to publish faster, and from anywhere, allowing The Huffington Post to capture the zeitgeist like never before," he said. "This site is not merely designed for a news consumer in 2015, but one in 2016, 2017, and so on. 

"We have spent years meticulously examining and measuring how people consume content across devices, with particular emphasis on mobile. With the new Huffington Post, we have built something that offers what's missing from today?s mobile experience, a way of previewing a mass of content all at once without getting lost in navigation or pulled down a rabbit hole of uninteresting, irrelevant content."

Final take
Brielle Jaekel is editorial assistant at Mobile Marketer