Quartz’s Seward on what makes something Quartz-y

Zach Seward, senior vice president of product and executive editor at financial news site Quartz, was named a Digiday Changemaker and was interviewed by Max Willens.

Here is an excerpt:

A lot of the things Quartz has put out there feel very unified. They feel Quartz-y. What makes something Quartz-y?
There’s some immutable values we have. The design should be built for users, first and foremost; you shouldn’t have to think about what you came looking for; it should work best on people’s phones. Some time ago, the goal was to make things work well on phones. We’ve tried to push ourselves to go past that. If it requires a tradeoff, where it doesn’t work quite as well on a desktop, that’s almost worth it to us.

Digital designers like to just get something quick together, then iterate in public. Publishers, historically, have preferred to fuss over things till they’re perfect. How do you think about that tension?
I, to be clear, subscribe to most principles of the MVP [minimum viable product] in product design. But sometimes what that means is, it’s something that doesn’t always work. We don’t have interest in doing it that way. A first impression is the most important one. There are countless examples of products that we worked on that we simply chose not to release.

Read more here.