LA Times new website design - May 2014

Beyond responsive: three mobile website design tricks becoming trends

The Los Angeles Times has a new-look website: a responsively designed effort from the same chaps behind sites for The Verge, Hearst and Mashable.

But apart from being mobile-friendly in its responsiveness, it also features a number of mobile-first design elements that we’re increasingly seeing across a number of websites.

There’s infinite scrolling – the likes of which you can find on qz.com.

There’s also a tablet-style “visual browse” mode, which works well on desktop and mobile (and presumably tablet) although on mobile it has much more of a Vox-style “card” look and feel about it.

Cards are increasingly becoming a fashionable way of displaying content online, and they work particularly well for mobile apps like Tinder and Secret as ways to quickly and easily view and share information.

For sites like Vox, they also help break up information into snackable bitesize chunks which helps explain their main articles.

Another (and perhaps the most interesting) thing is the LA Times’ “Sharelines” – pre-written Tweets readers can quickly share. These are positioned at the top of articles, as Nieman Lab’s Joshua Benton points out, to a) facilitate the fact that most readers tweet/share before reading and b) “serve as bullet-pointed story highlights to draw the reader in.”

#media - #responsive - #design - #mobile - #web