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Autosport's new mobile site (in Beta)


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#1 Grayson

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Posted 28 March 2014 - 11:26

We're very happy to announce that (after many months of development) the first Beta of Autosport's new mobile site is now live.

 

The new site is optimised to give you a far better experience on both mobile phones and tablet devices. Two of the biggest differences are that the new mobile site is designed around smaller screens and touchscreen usage. In addition, the navigation should now make more sense for the mobile experience. The site is semi-responsive, in that the same design and layout will work across very small screen sizes up to medium sized devices. You can view it on any sized device, but it hasn't been designed for larger screens so it may not look as good on a large monitor or any other device larger than a tablet computer.

 

Please note that the site is in Beta as it's an unfinished product. We think that it's already a better experience on a mobile than the desktop site, so it makes sense to release this now so that you can start to benefit from the improved site rather than having to wait, but we aren't going to start automatically redirecting you to the mobile site yet. We're hoping that by showing this to you now, we can make some rapid improvements based on the feedback we get...

 

A few known issues which we still need to fix:

- We are working on an upgrade for our image processing (which will give us the opportunity to use larger photos on the main site as well). Until that's done, some of the images will look pixelated if you're looking at them on a retina or other high resolution device.

- If you are a subscriber and have logged in on the main site, you may need to log in again on the mobile site.

- Autosport Live is not yet up and running on mobile. You will need to return to the desktop site to view this.

- Results aren't displaying within articles. We are working on a fix to this, but at present the results table which appear at the bottom of most race/qualifying reports isn't showing up at all and you will need to return to the desktop site to see these.

 

The site can be found at m.autosport.com

 

Any feedback, bug reports and questions (as well as the normal personal abuse) can be sent to simon.grayson@haymarket.com


Edited by Grayson, 28 March 2014 - 14:11.
Added another known issue


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#2 AvranaKern

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Posted 28 March 2014 - 18:38

Mobile site wouldn't open on my phone without giving any particular error. Just waiting to be loaded only not to be displayed.

 

Galaxy Note II, Android 4.1.2, Stock browser and Firefox, from Turkey.



#3 jcbc3

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Posted 28 March 2014 - 19:42

Erdogan did it!

 

Samsung S2 (I'm ancient), Works a treat. :clap:



#4 KWSN - DSM

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Posted 28 March 2014 - 20:46

Since jcbc3 have tried it and declared it a success, I will have to check it out on Spousal Unit's iPad.

 

:cool:

 

P.S. Does this mean some development resources will be freed up to complete the New Forum?



#5 Exar Kun

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Posted 29 March 2014 - 04:48

Not really interested until the results are showing up as this was the biggest stumbling block with using the app.  Glad to see it's being worked on but does this mean that the (paid) app has been orphaned?



#6 Grayson

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Posted 31 March 2014 - 15:45

Mobile site wouldn't open on my phone without giving any particular error. Just waiting to be loaded only not to be displayed.

 

Galaxy Note II, Android 4.1.2, Stock browser and Firefox, from Turkey.

 

Thanks for that. I've tested the site on a Galaxy Nexus (which I thought was supposed to be very similar functionally) and it seems to be working properly so we're going to have to do a bit more digging to work out what's going wrong here.

 

If anyone else is having a similar problem, could they let me know? Especially if you've got a similar device...

 

 

Glad to see it's being worked on but does this mean that the (paid) app has been orphaned?

 

In a manner of speaking. The idea is that once the mobile site is up and running properly out of Beta, it will be able to do everything that the current app can and will be free of charge (not including premium content) so will replace the need for the existing app. This will also solve the problem of having the app break down every time each different mobile platform puts out a new version!

 

For those who prefer apps to loading pages within a browser, it should be possible to wrap the site into a basic app for some platforms at this point.



#7 Slick

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Posted 06 April 2014 - 12:31

Looking good on first impressions. Definitely better than the old mobile site.

#8 babbel

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Posted 06 April 2014 - 12:53

I must say it looks really nice on first impression!

 

Would it be possible to include an option to disable images though? It's fine when I'm browsing on a tablet on WiFi but when I'm on the road it's quite abit of images that's being loaded when I'm only interested in the news bits and pieces (ie. text)



#9 AvranaKern

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Posted 07 April 2014 - 08:37

babbel: I don't know which browser you are using, but in most of them you can turn off pictures unless you connect via WiFi. I recommend Opera, which uses a compression technique so that even if you connect via your phone plan, pictures will consume less bandwidth.

 

Aaand finally I can access mobile web site. It's neat and useful, I liked that. Here are some suggestions:

 

1) It would be more user friendly if you put "This is a mobile version" warning at the footer.

2) When reading a story, there are links in the middle of them to another related stories, but they are bolded, which makes the reader think they are headings. So, can you format them differently?

3) Are we able to choose which categories of news we would like to see first? Formula 1, etc.

 

Well done and thanks!



#10 Grayson

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Posted 08 April 2014 - 10:32

Just to give everyone a bit of an update on how things are coming along...

 

Autosport Live is almost working. It should be up and running in time for the Chinese Grand Prix, and we might run a test of it for this Sunday's Race Centre Live so that we can see whether it's running smoothly. The next project after this will be to ensure that results are fed through into articles properly.

 

 

Would it be possible to include an option to disable images though? It's fine when I'm browsing on a tablet on WiFi but when I'm on the road it's quite abit of images that's being loaded when I'm only interested in the news bits and pieces (ie. text)

 

We can look into this but I've got a feeling that we might have baked the images into the site to the extent that we would struggle to offer this feature. Is this just an issue with Autosport or with all sites? Unless it's a bigger issue with our stie than it is with others (and off the back of Ali Unal's suggestion) would it make more sense to do this at a browser level rather than at Autosport's level?

 

 

Aaand finally I can access mobile web site. It's neat and useful, I liked that. Here are some suggestions:

 

1) It would be more user friendly if you put "This is a mobile version" warning at the footer.

2) When reading a story, there are links in the middle of them to another related stories, but they are bolded, which makes the reader think they are headings. So, can you format them differently?

3) Are we able to choose which categories of news we would like to see first? Formula 1, etc.

 

Well done and thanks!

 

I'm glad that this is working now. I don't think we changed anything with regards to the Galaxy Note so I'm still not sure why you weren't being shown the site properly before, unless it has something to do with the way that your local ISP was caching the page...

 

1) If you mean the rather prominent note at the top of the page then we agree - the plan is to remove this once we take the page out of Beta. We need to leave it on there until then, as anyone who lands straight on that page might wonder why there are some rather important chunks of the site missing...

 

2) That was a design decision on the basis that the traditional blue text to demonstrate a link doesn't quite look right on mobile. We can reexamine this once the mobile site has been live for a while to see whether readers get used to the bolded links or whether they still look wrong and like headings!

 

3) I take it you have seen the hub pages? Each series now has its own page with its news stories and features brought together. Once the high priority fixes have been made to the site we can look at changing the way that the homepage is ordered for logged in users.



#11 babbel

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Posted 08 April 2014 - 13:15


We can look into this but I've got a feeling that we might have baked the images into the site to the extent that we would struggle to offer this feature. Is this just an issue with Autosport or with all sites? Unless it's a bigger issue with our stie than it is with others (and off the back of Ali Unal's suggestion) would it make more sense to do this at a browser level rather than at Autosport's level?

 

 

 

To an extend it's something on every site ofcourse but m.autosport.com seems to use a picture for almost *everything*



#12 AvranaKern

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Posted 08 April 2014 - 21:20

Thanks Grayson, I hadn't realized the Menu button. It's nifty :)

 

The only problem I have been having is the Remember Me option, which wouldn't work. I have to Log in each time I opened the site, but I think it's a problem which will be resolved once the site is up and running.

 

I really liked it. Again, congrats!



#13 Jejking

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Posted 09 April 2014 - 10:11

It's working very well, I like it :)



#14 Grayson

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Posted 10 April 2014 - 10:45

We will be running a test of Autosport Live for mobile during this weekend's Race Centre Live. Hopefully it will all run smoothly, but you may need to return to the desktop site if not! If the test runs smoothly (or if we can iron out any bugs in time) then this will be in place for the live F1 sessions from China onwards.

 

As for the "remember me" bug, we've had this reported a few times so there seems to be something a bit wrong here. If anyone else can confirm whether or not it's working for them (and which browser you're using) then I can feed this back to the development team so that they can identify the problem...



#15 AvranaKern

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Posted 13 April 2014 - 08:26

As for the "remember me" bug, we've had this reported a few times so there seems to be something a bit wrong here. If anyone else can confirm whether or not it's working for them (and which browser you're using) then I can feed this back to the development team so that they can identify the problem...

I have been having Remember Me issue in both Android 4.1.2's stock browser and Firefox. My phone is rooted, so perhaps that's the culprit?



#16 slideways

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Posted 15 April 2014 - 01:27

Hi, I don't want to test the beta site. Can you please introduce a cookie to remember the fact I have already clicked "no" 500 times?

#17 AvranaKern

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Posted 15 April 2014 - 06:20

So, you clicked No but the site remembers you? Perhaps I should say No as well.

And why are you being so rude? It's called Beta for a reason, you know.

Edited by ali.unal, 15 April 2014 - 06:21.


#18 GhostR

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Posted 15 April 2014 - 16:48

2) That was a design decision on the basis that the traditional blue text to demonstrate a link doesn't quite look right on mobile. We can reexamine this once the mobile site has been live for a while to see whether readers get used to the bolded links or whether they still look wrong and like headings!

 

It might not look right, but I can say from personal experience that just plain bold doesn't work well either. On the site & forum I work on we've kept link formatting the same for Desktop and Mobile. What we've discovered through trial and error is that consistency of the user experience is more important than what "looks right". Ultimately, a consistent UI across all of your sites (Desktop, Mobile, Forum) is what you want. Subtle tweaks for aesthetic reasons should be fine, but otherwise keep things looking as similar as you can.


Edited by GhostR, 15 April 2014 - 16:50.


#19 Grayson

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Posted 17 April 2014 - 09:22

Our developers have identified the bug that meant that a lot of people weren't being remembered even though they clicked "remember me" and we think it's fixed now. Can those of you who were having this problem before try logging in again with that box ticked and let me know if you're forgotten again?

 

Autosport Live is also in place for all sessions of this weekend's Chinese Grand Prix - so let me know if there are any bugs around that.

 

 

 

Hi, I don't want to test the beta site. Can you please introduce a cookie to remember the fact I have already clicked "no" 500 times?

 

The site will hopefully be out of Beta in a matter of days, so we'll be getting rid of that note. I'm afraid you will have to put up with it until then...



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#20 AvranaKern

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Posted 17 April 2014 - 22:48

Our developers have identified the bug that meant that a lot of people weren't being remembered even though they clicked "remember me" and we think it's fixed now. Can those of you who were having this problem before try logging in again with that box ticked and let me know if you're forgotten again...

Unfortunately yes, it still forgets.

#21 jcbc3

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Posted 18 April 2014 - 09:04

Also forgot me :cry:



#22 Allan Lupton

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Posted 18 April 2014 - 10:01

I thought that one of the points of last year's downgrade was that we who use computers had to suffer so that you who use telephones got a better service.

From the tone of many of the posts on this thread it seems not to have provided that.

Has anything actually been improved?



#23 Grayson

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Posted 18 April 2014 - 10:34

Hmm... It sounds like the ability to remember logins might still need a bit more work.

 

 

I thought that one of the points of last year's downgrade was that we who use computers had to suffer so that you who use telephones got a better service.

From the tone of many of the posts on this thread it seems not to have provided that.

Has anything actually been improved?

 

 

Do you mean the forum upgrade from last summer? If so, then this mobile site is something entirely separate. It's the part of the site which covers news, features, live coverage of motorsport weekends, etc. Even if you haven't got a mobile phone, you can check it out at m.autosport.com to see what we're talking about in this thread! The forums aren't impacted at all by this.



#24 Option1

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Posted 18 April 2014 - 11:04

Or to put it another way, the forums are being left in beta downgrade while the mobile app apparently gets loving attention.  :down:  :down:

 

Neil



#25 Allan Lupton

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Posted 18 April 2014 - 11:27

Do you mean the forum upgrade from last summer? If so, then this mobile site is something entirely separate. It's the part of the site which covers news, features, live coverage of motorsport weekends, etc. Even if you haven't got a mobile phone, you can check it out at m.autosport.com to see what we're talking about in this thread! The forums aren't impacted at all by this.

Sorry if I'm confused, and got the wrong end of the stick.

Repairing the forum downgrade seems to have been abandoned and I thought this was

a) part of it and

b) taking what effort any software people were putting in.

 

ETA I tried that link and there seems to be a site mainly about Effone so I cannot comment.


Edited by Allan Lupton, 18 April 2014 - 11:33.


#26 jcbc3

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Posted 18 April 2014 - 13:14

That's not really fair, Allan.

 

There are headings for the different disciplines and there is a GP going on this weekend.



#27 Allan Lupton

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Posted 19 April 2014 - 07:40

. . . there is a GP going on this weekend.

Oh, if that's the case that would account for it, I suppose.



#28 Imperial

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Posted 22 April 2014 - 20:56

I would suggest 'Select a series' be far more prominent and definitely at the top of the page, not the very bottom. Its current position looks like an afterthought and askew with Autosport's position that it ain't all about F1 or rally. I'd rather see stuff like GP2, Indycar and F3 have permanent links at the top anyway. If you don't promote it, nobody will read it. At the very least, bring back 'Motorsport News', even if it has to go below the rallying and WEC news.

I also think you should split 'Breaking News' and 'Autosport+ Features' horizontally, with news at the top. After all news is always what people seek first.

I do like it though, nice and neat and actually looks inviting. The 'old' site is a bit dry with all the text links.

Please update the existing app though, I bought the app to ditch the website in the first place, plus I hate forced redirects!

#29 chdphd

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Posted 04 May 2014 - 08:32

The site looks good. Nice job. There are always cross-browser issues in web development and I guess going mobile is even worse due to the range of devices and browsers.

 

Here's a screenshot from my Samsung Galaxy Tablet (the original 7 inch one), using the default browser. The opaque headings aren't working and the spacing is a bit off.

 

SC20140504-090452.png


Edited by chdphd, 04 May 2014 - 12:37.


#30 Grayson

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Posted 07 May 2014 - 10:50

I would suggest 'Select a series' be far more prominent and definitely at the top of the page, not the very bottom. Its current position looks like an afterthought and askew with Autosport's position that it ain't all about F1 or rally. I'd rather see stuff like GP2, Indycar and F3 have permanent links at the top anyway. If you don't promote it, nobody will read it. At the very least, bring back 'Motorsport News', even if it has to go below the rallying and WEC news.

 

Have you seen the menu link at the top right of the page (the circle with three horizontal lines in)? The first option in the menus is the "Select a Series" dropdown. If people aren't noticing this then we might need to do something to make it more prominent!

 

 

 

Please update the existing app though, I bought the app to ditch the website in the first place, plus I hate forced redirects!

 

As I mentioned above, it's not going to make sense to update the existing app on multiple platforms alongside the mobile site, but we will look into setting up standalone apps from the mobile site which fulfil all of the functionality of the old apps. Unlike our current apps, this should mean that the app works even when there are updates of the phone's operating system.



#31 slideways

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Posted 26 May 2014 - 05:19

Hi, I don't want to test the beta site. Can you please introduce a cookie to remember the fact I have already clicked "no" 500 times?

 

 

 

The site will hopefully be out of Beta in a matter of days, so we'll be getting rid of that note. I'm afraid you will have to put up with it until then...

 

Hi,

As a paying customer of online (x2), digital, and the mobile app (x2), I would like to request again that you develop a cookie to remember the selection of the mobile site opt in popup.

 

I don't like mobile sites that compromise with content. I do like the full desktop experience. I don't like having to manually close this bar many times per day for what seems like months? now.



#32 babbel

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Posted 26 May 2014 - 06:02

One thing that annoys the crap out of me on the mobile site is the lack of results. In regular newsitems the final result is always shown but it's missing from the mobile site.



#33 hodgers

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Posted 27 May 2014 - 10:31

I'd be really interested to learn a bit more detail about what the main focus/objectives for the new website are. If I understand why you're making the decisions you're making, what the motivations are behind them and the user/stats research that has led you down this path, it would really help me provide feedback that's more informed & constructive and less personally-subjective. The first post in this topic says "The new site is optimised to give you a far better experience on both mobile phones and tablet devices.", but 'you' could mean a potentially enormous variety of users and 'better experience' can also mean a great many things!

For example, is the new homepage designed to cater more to new/casual users or heavy users / subscribers than the current homepage is? Is it more important for Autosport to improve traffic to a smaller set of 'top' stories or to encourage serendipitous exploration of the outstanding breadth of its coverage? To me, the answers appear to be the former in both cases — which can be absolutely fine & correct, but I'd like to understand *why* so I can put my own personal opinions about it in context.

Larger-sized headlines & images attached to every story are of course very enticing clickbait, but they come at the cost of reducing the number of links visible before I have to scroll or navigate. By comparison, on a standard tablet (or desktop, which I know is out of scope here) the current homepage has approximately 3x as many unique straight-to-content links before I need to scroll/navigate.

The images on the new homepage are very often purely decorative and not useful bits of content in their own right: there aren't photographs of Lewis & Nico actually feuding, so a promotion to a story about their current situation instead just shows a recent photo featuring both protagonists sitting/standing in the same frame; a story about Kimi still not being comfortable with his car just shows a standard photo of him in his Ferrari, driving round a corner somewhere recently. My point is two-fold here: firstly that more photos mean less room for other links on the page; and, secondly, a sea of pretty-but-content-poor images on the homepage reduces the potential impact & value of photographs that *do* contain some useful content, like an exclusive close-up of a piece of car that's failed scrutineering, or a dramatic accident scene – or even Lewis & Nico actually getting all up in each other's grills!

For the reasons above, I personally find the new homepage much less useful than the old one. I exaggerate now for dramatic effect, but for a heavy user & PLUS member like me, the ideal Autosport homepage is just a big list of text links, sorted reverse-chronologically (i.e. most recent at the top), labelled with category-based text (or an icon), marked with 'NEW'/'UPDATED' if they're new/updated since last I visited and greyed-out a bit if I've already read them. It doesn't have to be completely Daily-Mail-ified for me to want to click on everything  :stoned: 

The story/feature pages are really good. A couple of questions/issues:-

  • The main image on each story is now smaller than on the current website, which is a shame... unless of course it's just decorative. From the look of the top of the page, I suspect this'll be rectified by beautiful shiny new images in due course.
  • I'd echo user ali.unal's request about inline links just being displayed as bold. Bold, of course, traditionally means the semantic 'strong emphasis', just as italic means 'emphasis', so when I see such a thing in an article, I assume it's that rather than a link. A different colour or underline or combination of the two or something else different & distinctive would be appropriate here, therefore, particularly as rollover states aren't applicable on mobile or tablet.
  • Some elements in existing features no longer render in the new template (example premium feature 6037: current | new) :-
    • Emphasis (for example, the word 'former' in the second paragraph) and strong emphasis elements;
    • The writer's job title;
    • The feature preamble;
    • Image captions & copyright;
    • Subheadlines (the old template has them as inline-styled paragraphs, annoyingly, rather than proper headline elements).
  • The 'share' icons at the top take up a lot of space, which is partly a function of the huge vertical margins attached to the author name & date (which, I presume, is to cater for photo bylines) and partly because of their own margins. They're particularly distracting on mobile when they run on to two lines and look a bit like a mistake. Personally, I only find these things useful at the end of an article – i.e. only once I've read it do I decide whether I'd like to share it or not.

And a quick note on the top navigation bar: if my display is large enough to get a preview strip when I click on an item, the large '+' symbol at the far right makes me think I'm about to add that section to some sort of personal customisation area or that it's an Autosport+ feature rather than just a simple 'view all the contents' link. I'd recommend a change of symbol – perhaps to something like a downward-pointing triangle or right-pointing quotes.

Really looking forward to seeing how all this progresses. Oh, and +1 for a proper app or app-like wrapper for this eventually!


Edited by hodgers, 27 May 2014 - 11:49.


#34 Grayson

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Posted 28 May 2014 - 09:34

One thing that annoys the crap out of me on the mobile site is the lack of results. In regular newsitems the final result is always shown but it's missing from the mobile site.

 

Our development team are working on this as we speak... It's part of a slightly bigger revamp of the way the site processes results, which should mean that results appear on the site a little bit quicker.



#35 Grayson

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Posted 28 May 2014 - 10:07

I'd be really interested to learn a bit more detail about what the main focus/objectives for the new website are. If I understand why you're making the decisions you're making, what the motivations are behind them and the user/stats research that has led you down this path, it would really help me provide feedback that's more informed & constructive and less personally-subjective. The first post in this topic says "The new site is optimised to give you a far better experience on both mobile phones and tablet devices.", but 'you' could mean a potentially enormous variety of users and 'better experience' can also mean a great many things!

For example, is the new homepage designed to cater more to new/casual users or heavy users / subscribers than the current homepage is? Is it more important for Autosport to improve traffic to a smaller set of 'top' stories or to encourage serendipitous exploration of the outstanding breadth of its coverage? To me, the answers appear to be the former in both cases — which can be absolutely fine & correct, but I'd like to understand *why* so I can put my own personal opinions about it in context.

Larger-sized headlines & images attached to every story are of course very enticing clickbait, but they come at the cost of reducing the number of links visible before I have to scroll or navigate. By comparison, on a standard tablet (or desktop, which I know is out of scope here) the current homepage has approximately 3x as many unique straight-to-content links before I need to scroll/navigate.

 

Thanks for the detailed feedback. I'll address one significant part of it here...

 

One major reason for the large headlines and the photo-focused navigation out for desktop and mobile is based on the fact that mobile devices are touch operated. We know that users are currently pressing the wrong headline when using the desktop site on mobile - a huge number of the people have told us that this is a major issue. I also regularly do this myself, much to my frustration, and can see that it makes the desktop site fairly close to unusable on a phone. A large photo of Hamilton and Rosberg makes a fairly easy target for someone with aim as bad as mine to click on to make sure that they get through to the story.

 

To your larger point about the focus and objective of the mobile site, we've had a good look at the browsing patterns of people who are coming to our site from a mobile device and can see that both casual and heavy users mostly use the mobile to read breaking news and the very newest features (even with the current desktop layout which makes it quite easy to find older material) in fairly short and regular bursts (which means that they have already seen the older content on the site). On the other hand, the site's heavier users and subscribers go more in depth and spend more time on the site from a desktop, where they are also more likely to read some of the older content on the site. As such, we've tried to make sure that it's easy to access the top stories/features and the most popular stories as easily as possible from the new mobile site.

 

That said, the enormous list of content (which can be found here for news and here for features) will always be a feature of the desktop site and we should probably look into a way of offering something more like that as a category page on the mobile site...



#36 hodgers

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Posted 28 May 2014 - 12:59

Thanks for taking the time to reply, Grayson. Those two enormous lists of content to which you link are, totally predictably, among my very favourite — alongside the 'All' list within 'News' in the app, so the continuation of something like that on the new website would be extremely welcome indeed.



#37 Slick

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Posted 11 June 2014 - 05:58

I am still being plagued with the lack of memory of the new mobile site to remember my login wishes. I use a number of sites that enable remember functionality and they do not forget quite as often as the mobile Autosport site does, which I think has remembered only once or twice in the last 2 months and then only for one occasion.

 

Apart from that the site seems to work quite well on my Galaxy S3



#38 Grayson

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Posted 27 June 2014 - 15:01

Good news - results should now be appearing properly in news stories! We've also set up cookies to remember whether you want to be taken to the mobile site or not (Slideways - you'll only have to click the option to visit the Desktop page one more time and it will remember this!)

 

Next up, we want to try to figure out why the system seems to be forgetting so many people's logged in status...



#39 Myrvold

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Posted 28 June 2014 - 03:02

Did not show times for me, name and position, but not times.

Also, I must admit it is sliiightly annoying to have a full-screen ad when I'm logged in as a subscriber.

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#40 Grayson

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Posted 28 June 2014 - 09:05

Did not show times for me, name and position, but not times.

Also, I must admit it is sliiightly annoying to have a full-screen ad when I'm logged in as a subscriber.

 

You've got a right to be more than slightly annoyed - you shouldn't see any advertising at all if you're a logged in subscriber!

 

You do need to log in separately for the mobile site, by clicking on the user icon (the head and shoulders on the top right of the screen). If you've done this, and you're able to read the AUTOSPORT+ features, can you let me know whether you're only seeing the overlay advert or whether banners and MPUs (the square ads) are also showing? This is a very serious but which we'll need to fix!



#41 kwikmike

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Posted 30 June 2014 - 19:13

You've got a right to be more than slightly annoyed - you shouldn't see any advertising at all if you're a logged in subscriber!

You do need to log in separately for the mobile site, by clicking on the user icon (the head and shoulders on the top right of the screen). If you've done this, and you're able to read the AUTOSPORT+ features, can you let me know whether you're only seeing the overlay advert or whether banners and MPUs (the square ads) are also showing? This is a very serious but which we'll need to fix!


I get the full screen banner each time, and when I click on the user button I get redirected to the website of the sponsor. After closing this I can logon on the site, but this happens every time I want to access the site. Very frustrating.. Hope this can be resolved soon. Thanks in advance!

#42 Gilles4Ever

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Posted 05 July 2014 - 06:19

When logging on to the mobile site it is not triggering the forums to be ad free. I have to revert to the desktop site, log in there, (it doesn't remember me) and only then doesn't I get the forum as free.

#43 Grayson

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Posted 07 July 2014 - 11:30

The main login memory bug should now be fixed...

 

I know that it turned out to still be broken the last time I said that, but we're a lot more confident this time! If anyone logs in today (with the "remember me" box ticked) and then finds that they're being forgotten again, could you please let me know?

 

When logging on to the mobile site it is not triggering the forums to be ad free. I have to revert to the desktop site, log in there, (it doesn't remember me) and only then doesn't I get the forum as free.

 

This might be a bit of a problem, as the forum is effectively part of the desktop site for the purposes of the login cookies... Our dev team are going to try to figure out whether there's a way round this, but this certainly isn't going to be a quick fix.



#44 Grayson

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Posted 19 August 2014 - 16:34

Thanks for taking the time to reply, Grayson. Those two enormous lists of content to which you link are, totally predictably, among my very favourite — alongside the 'All' list within 'News' in the app, so the continuation of something like that on the new website would be extremely welcome indeed.

 

It's taken a little while longer than we were hoping, but we've advanced a bit on this front.

 

As well as the F1 news/features page, there is also now a page with all of our news:

 

http://m.autosport.com/news

 

This page actually contains quite a lot more items than the news page on the desktop or the "all" page on the old mobile app - the most recent 80 stories are there. Even during the busiest times of the season, this should be enough for anyone!



#45 hodgers

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Posted 20 August 2014 - 10:56

Aaaand... bookmarked!   :D



#46 chdphd

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Posted 18 November 2014 - 18:12

I've found it much nicer to use since I signed in. The ads seemed to take ages to load and one even covered the entire screen with a rather small X in the top left corner.

 

Could you add some visual feedback when you press a link? It's nice to know you did something.

 

http://css-tricks.co...ctors/a/active/



#47 Peter Perfect

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Posted 11 January 2015 - 15:57

Does this supercede the android app? Are there any future plans on that front?



#48 Grayson

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Posted 13 January 2015 - 10:24

Does this supercede the android app? Are there any future plans on that front?

 

Yes, it does.

 

As I mentioned earlier in the thread, the mobile site now does everything that the apps could do and more (and in a less broken way). The current plan is that any improvements which we would have wanted to make to the apps will be made to the mobile site instead - this means that developments and improvements should work on every device. Mobile technology is still changing very fast, so this plan may change in the medium term.

 

If you like the app format, the site has been designed to be webapp enabled. This means that if you save the site to your homescreen (from a menu in the browser), you can click the Autosport logo to launch the site like an app without firing up your mobile browser.



#49 Alfisti

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Posted 13 January 2015 - 15:59

i still have an issue on BB Z10 where it does not auto detect the mobile option and the manual selection process is extremely difficult as it's tucked away in the bottom left corner in tiny font. When i go back to my laptop or desktop, it again doe snot auto select the full site and retains mobile if i have manually selected this option on my phone. 


Edited by Alfisti, 13 January 2015 - 15:59.


#50 Gilles4Ever

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Posted 24 January 2015 - 14:59

I am still having an issue with logging in on the mobile site being treated differently to logging in to the desktop version.

Whenever the forum decides to re-check my login status on Autosport+ to see if it must be show ads or not, when ads start appearing in the forum, on my phone or tablet I need to go to the main site, change to the desktop version and log on again, being logged on in the mobile version makes no difference.

The check box for auto login also doesn't seem to be remembered.

I am using chrome on Android 5.01 on my phone and chrome on Android 4.4.4 on my tablet.