ABC.es, founded in 1903, is the oldest newspaper in Spain. It was the first in Spain to publish a picture and the first to publish an infographic - to illustrate the legendary sinking of the Titanic. So it seemed justifiable that it would also create its own website specifically for its readers who predominantly used mobile to read their favorite daily. The online version of ABC.es sums around 11 million monthly unique users, an impressive figure that’s equivalent to a fourth of the Spanish population. More than five million of those readers only use their smartphones to catch up on their daily news. In light of this data, ABC.es wanted its mobile readers to have an optimum experience and engaged us to redesign their ABC.es mobile website. Our creative idea was to personalize their experience, by creating the design as "an ABC just for me".

We began with research in the heart of content generation for ABC: the newsroom. We held interviews, attended meetings, and shadowed journalists, technicians, editors etc., gaining great insights from these experiences. Understanding their meticulousness, ability for self-criticism and all of the steps they take to generate the content was key to our design concept. We learned that there were silos within the different versions of the newspaper: the news was primarily developed for the printed edition, then the digital edition, hence mobile readers did not have an experience with content that felt really designed for them, causing the brand to be perceived differently from the printed edition to the digital. We decided to bring cross-channel visual consistency to the brand and recommended that ABC take some elements of their physical edition—such as typography and color ranges—to their mobile website as well.

We created an information architecture workshop where we delved into the lifecycle of digital content, including how to adapt different types of news pieces to the small screen of a smartphone and how adding sound, video and interaction to the news would affect the storytelling and user experience. After taking all of the research into consideration , we developed our concept, “an ABC just for me”, taking into account some design pillars to help shape the design decisions, whether visual or UX, such as coherence, rigor, adaptability and personalization.

Key elements for the mobile reader were the ability to activate and deactivate sections to configure their own front page with the content that most interested them and tracking their favorite writers, receiving alerts when these authors published new articles. For the news, they could share it on social networks and also save it on their user panel to read later.