Pixel imperfect: Serving an online audience with responsive content

Michael Cairns, COO at Publishing Technology

Michael Cairns, COO at Publishing Technology, kicked off the Pixel Imperfect session at Frankfurt Book Fair's Contec conference. He asked what is responsive web design?

In 2010 Ethan Marcotte coined the term in a landmark article on A List Apart. It is not a new idea, but made possible by recent technologies. Responsive web design is about designing systems, and not websites. It forces us to think bigger and put users and how they use content at the centre of the design process.

The Boston Globe site is a good example of responsive design - resize your browser to see how the content reflows. It's worth bearing in mind that Google has a preference for accessible websites with one set of content and one URL.

Gartner reported that enterprise tablet adoption is growing by 50% per year. Mobile is increasingly important. Now is the time to think about what your responsive web design strategy is going to be. Don't forget that libraries subscribe to a huge amount of content

But it is a confusing landscape: not just Apple, but Android, and for now, Blackberry. When you see stats such as the IBM/Tealeaf report that 85% of users expect that a mobile website should be at least as good as the desktop, you have to move forward with responsive design.

Some considerations:

• Do you want or need to be in the App store?
• Do you rely on or make use of device-specific functionality like the camera?
• Do you have a specific functional focus?

Do you have a content focused approach which requires broad device support? Are there frequent content changes and do you need better discoverability via a third party such as Google? Plan with several things in mind: the audience, content and functionality (Cairns stresses the importance of content strategy), capability, and cost process. Context is very important. With the device, what device is typically used? With the location, where is it used? With time or circumstance, what's the experience (e.g. physicians on the ward)?

It's complicated. Apple iOS has 6 different size/resolution combinations. HTC has 12. Even within these platforms there is significant deviation. And it is getting more complicated with the introduction of Microsoft and Asus tablets.

Cairn's advice on how to do RWD right starts with understanding your users and how they access and use your content. Prioritise your content based on the above, then build a site architecture that answers to these priorities. Design a site that provides content for users across device-types and contexts, with grids and typography and images that adapt.

What is responsive web design? It is where you maintain one website that services all devices and screen sizes. It provides complete support for all web pages and features, regardless of the device or screen size. And it enables you to implement changes across all devices.

Michael Kowalski from Contentment, with a cloud

Michael Kowalski, Founder at content editorial start-up Contentment, observed that online increasingly means on a tablet, device or a phone: it's not just about the web any more. There are two new channels, ebook and apps, that are of interest to publishers (as you can make money out of them).

Crucially, there's no standardisation with apps. Kowalski took the last ABC audit figures on the PPA website and crunched the data. He found that in magazines and business media, print is seeing a 10% year on year decline while there is 108% growth on digital.

There's a lot of room for growth in magazines and business media. As a sector, they initially tried a number of techniques to get their content onto devices. First of all they did nothing, taking content, putting it into PDF and then on to the app store. But replicas on phones are rubbish. Then they stuck with the familiar and replicated magazine layout. Now they are going with CSS (and similar) media queries honed on the web that can be used to do responsive content. There are a number of tools that can be used for hybrid apps (native apps with HTML5 inside) including PhoneGap, Trigger.IO and pugpig.

Kowalski believes web publishing killed content design. He asked what happened to creative freedom? What happened to designing around our content? Did we struggle in vain? Can't we have those nice things? Developers think template first, squirt content through it later, separate content from presentation. Designers think that a template is a starting point.

Kowalski believes that you can turn one big problem into many small problems. How do you deal with fixed aspect ratio? You could crop, but do you have rights to do that? You can tag an image as portrait, landscape or squarish, using captions. You can use templates with manual override to adapt to different images or use disclosure (+ sign to open up text).  If you use tables you can convert each row to a mini table on small screens, add paging or disclosure to avoid long scrolling experience. Fonts can be painfully expensive so open source fonts are well worth investigating.

Solve each of these issues one by one, but what about bigger problems? A little bit of print content can go a long way in digital. There are various ways you can pack more content into the same real estate without it becoming too noisy. But content fitting is a hard habit to kick. Responsive design is a big, hard change for print designers. Web designers are your friends. Kowalski closed by urging the room to think more like digital product designers.

What does the user want to do? How can we make it easy for them?

Big Data / Little Data: The practical capture, analysis and integration of data for publishers

Laura Dawson, from Bowker, leans in.

Laura Dawson from Bowker provided the ultimate 'Data 101' for publishers at the Big Data/Little Data session at Frankfurt Book Fair's Contec conference.

She cautioned that data doesn't stop with getting something on Amazon. They have tracked the explosion in the amount of books. In the United States there were 900,000 books in print in 1999. This grew to 28 million in 2013. Information is on a massive scale. We are swimming in it.

There is a problem and opportunity in this abundance. The problem is with fluidity - all this information is out of the container. Abundance, persistance and fluidity lead to issues with discovery.

There are four different types of metadata:

1. Bibliographic: basic book information, the classic understanding of metadata.
2. Commercial: tax codes, proprietary fields.
3. Transactional: inventory, locations, order and billings, royalties, etc.
4. Merchandising: descriptive content, marketing copy, consumer oriented content.

Part of the challenge of managing metadata are the many different sources. There are publisher prepared files, publisher requests (typically email), data aggregators (e.g. Bowker), social reading sites, online and offline retailers and libraries (remember them?).

Other complicating factors for digital metadata include differential timing (physical books require 6 months prior, digital upon publication). There are different attributes and more frequent price changes. Conversions are often outsourced and, in relative terms, this is a whole new process.

Current metadata practices tend to include creation in 4 primary departments (editorial/managing editorial, marketing, production and creative services). Management responsibility varies by sender. Most publishers treat publication as end date for updates (although this is changing). Complete does not mean accurate, inspection is limited. And prepping metadata is somewhat ad hoc. But it's not all bad news. Many publishing houses are now looking at metadata as a functional map. They are examining the process and putting all data into a metadata repository.

Best practice in organising metadata is emerging. You need a hub - a single source of truth for your data able to deal with multiple contributors and multiple recipients. Design defined roles and provide a single source. Identifiers are much more efficient to search engines than thesauri. Text matching doesn't work across character sets or even languages that use the same characters.

There are a number of codified representations of a concept that should be used as they are helpful to search engines as they are short cuts:

• ISBN - numerical representation of a book
• ISNI - for a name
• GTIN - for a tradable product
• ISO Numeric Country Codes - for a country. 

Machine language is key. Codes are easier to process than text, faster and less complex. Codes are unambiguous. Natural language evolves and is more unstable. You can use linking data sets using ISNI. Content's new vocabulary is based upon:

• structured content
• linked data/linked open data
• the semantic web
• ontology
• Good Relations - an ontology devised specifically for describing products for sale
• RDF - Resource Description Framework
• and data visualisation.

Steve Smith, President and CEO at Wiley: Persevering in the Middle

Steve Smith, President & CEO of Wiley

Steve Smith, President and CEO of Wiley, opened the Contec conference at Frankfurt Book Fair with a call for publishers to expand along the value chain of their customers.

Wiley traditionally focused its offering in pedagogical support and active teaching evaluation. Through their acquisition of Deltak, they now offer a total turn-key solution for the provision of higher education.

Transformation in the business has to go beyond digital. Go deep: it is no longer enough to be a provider of information. You must build a relationship with your community. Solutions are found through deep knowledge of customer workflows to find ways to solve their pain points and go beyond their needs. You must focus on outcomes, for example, in research recognise the key driver to publish articles is reputation, develop proven outcomes that will support that. 

He reflected that it has to be digital. Their scholarly journals business is now 85% digital. They produce highly discoverable, enriched content using enrichment and semantic tagging. However, they still continue to depend on library budgets. And it's a fact these budgets are not growing to keep pace with spending of research and development.

There are some major challenges in the digital marketplace. In some segments of the business, substitution is an issue. Consumers find they can get access that is good enough to solve their needs, free to use and paid for by advertising. There is a change in the balance of power between device manufacturers and content distributors on one hand and content creators on the other. You have empowered and demanding consumers. As we have seen with ebook pricing, digital business models are often weaker than traditional, legacy models.

Wiley have responded by looking at pain points for customers and developing solutions through their value chain. They looked at the research cycle to see where they could provide business solutions to help the community. Smith broke this down into a cycle with four stages:

1. Ideation: they provide competitive intelligence, insight and decision support, literature interaction and data review.
2. Planning: opportunities to help with grant-writing, compliance and research planning.
3. Experimentation: solutions around protocols, data management, data analysis and resource management.
4. Dissemination: assistance with data sharing, IP protection, publication and networking.

On the professional side, they have shifted their focus to the 'Wiley Career Arc'. Again, it is through looking at the pain points in career development - from leaving university with the qualifications, but not necessarily the skills, to securing the necessary professional practice qualifications - their focus shifts from educational practice to being all about people and jobs.

You must leverage strengths and assets. How do you cope with the challenge of how to develop new business solutions at the same time as enhancing and protecting your core, legacy business? Focus on your content strengths and build on your deep knowledge of the communities you serve. Expand along the value chain of the customer and build/partner/acquire to deliver this (as they did with Deltak). 

Innovation that isn't customer led is not going to be successful.