Mobile web & app design experience

Mobile web & app design experience

I have extensive experience with mobile web and app design, particularly in my role as Director of Product Design and an art director for the international media design agency García Media from 2011 to 2015.

Most projects I worked on included a responsive web or mobile/tablet app component. At García Media, I would partner with editors and designers from our client news organizations to rapidly create mobile prototypes. These prototypes were key parts of launching new mobile app and web experiences, as we did for The McClatchy Company’s 29 daily American newspapers and Postmedia’s eight Canadian dailies.

I frequently presented on the opportunities in, and best practices for, an increasingly mobile world to executives and editors and edited the ebook iPad Design Lab: Storytelling in the Age of the Tablet.

Columbia Journalism Review

I led the design and front-end development for our responsive redesign of the Columbia Journalism Review. Given its lengthy articles, we strove to make sure that CJR offered a highly readable experience on mobile.

I spent a great deal of time tweaking the type palette I selected to ensure that the text was comfortable to read on small screens and that the elegant headlines were just the right visual weight.

(While the cjr.org homepage has been redesigned substantially, the current article page largely reflects my design and front-end work except for the new nav that has been added since our involvement.)

Columbia Journalism Review mobile screen

Columbia Journalism Review article page opener on mobile

See more about CJR

The McClatchy Company

I worked on multiple mobile web and app prototypes as part of a print and digital rethinking of The McClatchy Company’s 29 daily newspapers, including the Miami Herald and The Kansas City Star.

Selected prototypes from my work with McClatchy—click or tap above to scroll through each of them

Left: prototype of a mobile web news feed, centering on varied storytelling techniques and letting readers follow major stories over time

Middle: mobile prototype of a responsive article page, with quick takeaways for busy readers

Right: tablet app prototype, with a main curated news section and light personalization elements at the bottom

See more about the McClatchy project

The Business Journals’ account section

At American City Business Journals, my team and I almost always design responsive web experiences. But mobile was a particularly important consideration in the work that I directed on our account page.

Our team overhauled the account section to better align with core user tasks and accommodate future initiatives. At the start of the project, we set up a survey asking our users why they came to the account section. The survey revealed that the most common reason for coming to the account section was to update your information, such as a new email address or mailing address.

While the previous account overview page placed “Edit account info” in a secondary position off to the side, we designed the new overview page to place users’ core information front and center, along with a strong call to action to edit it.

E-commerce delivery information screen

Account overview screen on mobile. Navigation and customer support are front and center on mobile to help users find the information they need and get on with their day

The next most common user tasks were viewing/editing their subscription status and updating their email newsletter subscriptions, which led us to make those prominent tiles on the account overview page, too. We conducted usability tests on prototypes, which confirmed that the account overview's organization and language made sense to our users.

iPad Design Lab: Storytelling in the Age of the Tablet

I edited and designed Mario García’s ebook on creating tablet apps. Mario and I began working on the ebook only a few months after the iPad’s release. HOW Books published iPad Design Lab as an interactive “multitouch textbook” through iBooks in September 2012.

The book’s content and interactive design was favorably reviewed on the blog of the Society of Publication Designers. It also received the QED (Quality, Excellence Design) Seal, which indicates “to an ebook reader / app user that the title will render well in their preferred reading format....”

See the non-interactive version of iPad Design Lab on Amazon

"iPad Design Lab" trailer on Vimeo

iPad Design Lab page
iPad Design Lab page

Screens from the ebook I designed

See more about iPad Design Lab

© 2020 Reed Reibstein