How Quartz strives to be an 'ever-evolving' platform

Yesterday, Quartz revealed a series of changes made to its web and mobile platforms, in what officially marks the brand's 4.0 version.

Zach Seward, executive editor and VP of product at Quartz, told Journalism.co.uk this is an upgrade, rather than a redesign, as the company tries to be more iterative in their design and always "make changes with an eye towards what habits we're trying to address and improve on".

"It's hard on the web to keep design fresh and move as quickly as readers' habits seem to change these days.

"If we sit down and take a year to figure out the details of a plan, another year to build it and another year still to make sure everything is in order, then three years later we've got a redesign that tries to address trends that by that point are way out of date and puts us behind whatever the new trends are."

So Quartz's latest update caters to the growing size of mobile devices: a more "thumb-friendly" interface with a navigation bar at the bottom of the screen, and optimisation for viewing stories in the browsers of social media apps.


Screenshot of the new qz.com on mobile

Taking inspiration from the New York Times, stories now show the reader a few paragraphs before a 'read full story' button, which reveals the rest of the article and some related reading.

It's hard on the web to keep design fresh and move as quickly as readers' habits seem to change these daysZach Seward, Quartz executive editor

"Instead of a long, continuous scroll of stories, we are displaying a selection of headlines and images which you can pick from," explained Seward, "or you can use the bar along the bottom to navigate elsewhere on the site."

Yesterday also marked the launch of Quartz Africa, similar to the Quartz India edition, which launched last year.

"Anyone in that region gets the experience by default," he pointed out, "and we also show that experience to people anywhere in the world if they're coming to an article that's specifically in that edition."

Readers can customise their default edition by choosing whether they want it to be the London, Africa or India one regardless of their location. "To do this, we added some messaging around the site to make sure we're making it clear to users which edition they are in," Seward added.

A large team of developers, designers and software engineers contributed to the latest release, a challenging project to manage when changes happen on a weekly basis.

"It requires us to keep moving quickly. When you're making changes frequently, you're bound to make mistakes, whether you have to fix a bug or change something that didn't come out the way you were hoping," Seward said, referring to Quartz as an "ever-evolving" website.

"We have to be on our toes and think about the design as more of a living organism, rather than a frozen-in-time website."


Screenshot of Our Picks from qz.com

Quartz's previous version was released in August 2014, introducing a homepage for the first time.

"The significant changes to the user experience we tend to announce publicly and write a little bit about what we're doing and why in order to be transparent and get feedback from users," he explained, but back-end changes are not always obvious to readers.

Quartz uses A/B testing for many changes, showing some small changes to readers to gauge their reaction, before making them public depending on the feedback received.

Our philosophy is to make small decisions based on data and large decisions based on our gutZach Seward, Quartz executive editor

People can react in different ways when presented with two versions of the same website and this "doesn't necessarily tell you whether you're achieving your ultimate goals", said Seward.

"Often we just have to go for it, trust that we've got a pretty good sense of what we're trying to do and what our readers like and then improve through small tweaks based on what the data says."

Although navigation mechanics, like continuous scroll, maybe harder to test, "moving a sign-up module to a different part of the site [for example] is the sort of question we should obviously test, rather than guess what might happen," Seward pointed out.

Quartz's philosophy for a while now, he said, is to "make small decisions based on data and large decisions based on our gut."

And Seward believes a huge focus will be on making the navigation more intuitive in the future.

"We're going to see if the new way of getting around the site is clear enough to users and if they are making use of it in the way we expected," he said. "If not, what are they doing instead and do we need to adapt to that?"

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