How Forbes has overhauled its mobile experience

Lewis Dvorkin, the chief product officer at Forbes, writes about how the magazine has overhauled its mobile experience.

Dvorkin writes, “With our new desktop pages and mobile web app, officially called a Progressive Web App, we upended our thinking and rebuilt our technology house to produce some of the fastest loading pages on the Internet. The PWA itself is nothing short of a total mobile overhaul. The look and feel is dramatically different, as is the navigation. The content experience will be increasingly mobile-first — that is, a card-based system of text, video, graphics and more — specifically built for phones (see below). Maybe most important of all, we’re developing a new conceit for how editorial interacts with mobile ad treatments.

“It’s been a haul to get to get to a new place. Institutional inertia always looms. So does marketplace skepticism. Both are typically driven by the human fear of change. Then comes the wrenching staff adjustments that true change requires. Our desktop and mobile push, a mix of rigorous optimization and innovation, required a new technology development mentality. First came a commitment to writing high quality code. That required our programmers to think like minimalists. After that we moved to what the industry calls continuous deployment, or non-stop micro-product releases of new features, updates, maintenance and more. Real-time and comprehensive QA are also part of the process. Gone is that enterprise tech ethos of drumroll-release dates that are many months if not years apart. For the PWA, our journalists needed to stretch themselves beyond a century-old reliance on the 800-word story.”

Read more here.