Mario Garcia shared ten lessons he learned while working on tablet applications. Those should be taken into consideration by publishers, but they should do it quickly, as three weeks delay in doing so may mean as well being late 3 months in realtime. The competitors are moving ahead quickly.

Mario Garcia’s ten lessons to learn are:

1. Telling Stories Across Platforms. Lesson 1: we must think in terms of a media quartet. Today it’s not about that one medium should be ahead of others. It’s not about print first or digital first. The medium quartet, therefore print, web, mobile and tablet should be treated equally, and publishers should think in terms of “story first”.
2. What the Tablet Is? Lesson 2: a platform that must be conceptualized to accommodate its uniqueness. Online has never been so close to print as tablets are. This is why publishers should think about tablet editions, as finite, finishable applications.
3. The Lean Back Platform? Lesson 3: all available researches shows a preference for evening use of the tablet. Last Nielsen research proves that tablets, again, are most likely to be used on the couch, in front of the TV. The prime time of tablet usage is between 7PM and 11PM, and this is also the time when the smartphone usage is dropping. It also means that the time dedicated to using the tablet is user’s personal time.
4. What the Tablet is Not. Lesson 4: It is not a replication of the print/online experience. It goes beyond to create an immersive experience but also can take role of one of other medias. To Garcia for instance tablet is equal to a good book.
5. Covering Three Tracks. Lesson 5: Users want their newspaper tablet apps to have the three main tracks of curated edition, news updates and e-readers. It is exactly about kowing what the reader wants.
6. The Tablet and Design. Lesson 6: Make it sophisticatedly simple. Tablets are not newspapers so they don’t have to look like ones.
7. Create Those Pop Up Moments. Lesson 7: allow for a curiously impatient finger. Designing for print means doing it for eyes and brain only. Designing for tablets requires remembering about the fingers of an impatient user. That’s when pop-ups in an app come in handy.
8. Pay Attention to the Essentials. Lesson 8: start with a good sense of navigation, make sure user always knows how to go from point A to point C or Z. When online, what people usually do is click, scroll and swipe. Garcia noticed, that tablets are more about swiping left or right then scrolling. All social buttons (facebook, twitter, email) should be visible all the time.
9. Make It Functional. Lesson 9: remember what the users are coming to your tablet for. The journalists should be trained in creating all types of content: short, and long forms, audio and video. It’s readers’ expectations that should be met.
10. Consider a Curated Edition. Lesson 10: At its best, a news app is especially edited and prepared. Remember that the tablet edition will never be a replica of the newspaper. It should focus on trends, and be prepared by the team of most creative people inside the news organisation.

U-sentric is a Belgium-based user experience engineering and design company. 

Ms. Beysen and Tarra Shrimpton-Smith, a project manager at U-sentric, spoke with our Inge van Gaal at the Web Goes Mobile seminar in Grimbergen in Belgium on Dec. 4, 2008.

They explained why it is so important now to keep consumers happy, especially if you create a website in this so competitive world.

Watch full interview:

(Video by Tom Corbett of INMA.)

Results of exit polls from the first swinging states were known in Europe late at night on November 4-5 — at about 2 AM in London (GMT) or at 3 AM in Paris, Berlin and Warsaw (CET).

Obama’s victory was decided even later — at about 4 AM (GMT) or 5 AM (CET).

So it was a nightmare for newspaper editors.

In most of their printed editions they could do no more than play with readers and try to invite them to their online editions, as editors of a Belgian daily newspaper De Morgen did:

What did readers see online, when they logged in this morning?

(Want to see more front pages of printed editions of European newspapers? Go to gallery at Newseum.)

Some European newspapers invested in their websites to change its layout and offer interactive features they could not have provided in print.

Here’s a great example of the UK Guardian’s home page:

Changing a structure of this home page must have been much more expensive and time-consuming than changing a layout of a front page in print. They needed to involve not only editors and designers, but their technology staff.

Here is a collection of home pages of some other nationwide European newspapers, as retrieved at 9 AM (GMT) or 10 (AM CET) on November 5th:

Mr. Gaffre from Newsmedia company participanted at a recent INMA conference in Vienna (October 1-3, 2008) and shared his views with forum4editors.com on re-design process.

Michel Gaffre who worked on re-design of well known European daily newspapers like Le Monde in France and Les Temps in Switzerland underlines that design should serve the contents of the newspaper, but admits that people responsible for the contents sometimes oppose any change of layout.

“There are many people who don’t like to change. So you have to help them,” says Mr. Gaffre. “You can change the newspaper, but you have train its staff.”

According to him the main goal of layout re-design is to increase circulation. Sometimes the new layout does not help.

“When a project is not successful, the one to blame is the team from outside,” admits Mr. Gaffre.

Watch full interview with Michel Gaffre:

(Interview made by Artur Karda, multimedia reporter at Media Regionalne, Polish part of Mecom Group.)