Jan Macarol Vrabec is one of those uncles from the background who make sure that when surfing online media, the experience is as user-friendly as possible.
Jan also "surfs" from project to project, currently he stopped at citymagazine's website, which came to life in a completely new image. He currently devotes his "free time" to his own start-up, and in his real free time his passion is gadgets and technological excesses.
One of your latest projects is the completely new "look" of City Magazine online. What was the challenge for you to create a website for an already established magazine?
I have been dealing with online media for about a decade. Mostly with projects that have always interfered in the media sphere and mostly lived exclusively not online. City Magazine mainly with its content, which is very "online", presented the challenge of adapting quality printed content to the web. This is not just about technologies, but the entire philosophy of the medium, which must adapt to the web, to the extent that things work. This is where the most challenges come from. How to offer richness of information and rubrics in a simple user experience.
What new experience does the new website offer the user?
Above all, we wanted it to be different from other portals on citymagazine.si user experience simple. The site works by endlessly loading content vertically, which means that the user scrolls down through the content. The contents thus follow each other ad infinitum. We wanted there not to be too many distracting elements for the user when viewing the content.
How do you see over time? citymagazine.si?
In the future, City Magazine will also be available as an app, so it is important to offer the same experience to the user. The site is philosophically and design-wise extremely close to apps, which was also our goal. Only these offer a comparable user experience for viewing content. So it won't matter where and how you use it, the experience will always be comparable. Already today, it is adapted for all devices, as it uses a flexible design that adapts to the capabilities of the device on which the website is viewed.
In which direction are the trends of online technologies in the field of media going?
Online trends are related to technologies. And these show that in the future we will get an identical operating system on all devices where we use the Internet. Both on computers and mobile devices. This is evidenced by the extremely rapid development of advanced mobile devices, which are already powerful computers today. This will also change the way online media is used.
In what way?
A multitude of applications, previously only present on mobile phones and tablets, will suddenly appear on the PC desktop. If the medium is not present on all platforms, users will quickly overlook it. All of a sudden these two worlds will intersect completely. The fight for the "heart" of the user and his loyalty will be increasingly difficult for smaller and technologically less developed media. Touch screens and a multitude of technical innovations are coming, which are already changing media "consumption". And everything shows that it will be even more varied.
How does creating a media website work in practice?
It is a multifaceted process, the basis of which is an extremely good knowledge of the medium. Then you have to completely reset everything you've learned and try to think outside your own box. In projects like City Magazine, the technical part of the production represents a good 20 percent, everything else is strategic planning of development, content and everything else. The online medium should never stand still. In this respect, it is never an ordinary website, but must set new challenges for itself every day. At City Magazine, it was definitely also a matter of changing the "media culture" from print to digital. A multitude of factors come into play here, such as daily editorial, current affairs... Everything works a bit differently than with printed media. In the end, only the reach of the online medium counts, and after the first month, City Magazine is very successful in this, surpassing the print distribution of 70,000 copies with more than 73,000 different users online. We have set extremely ambitious goals, and we hope that the project will soon reach 150,000 Slovenian online users on a monthly basis.
You have (co)created many online stories. Which of your projects are you most proud of, what would you highlight?
I have a hard time talking about past projects or projects where I am no longer a team member. Only these are changing rapidly in the media world, both philosophically and design-wise. I participate in projects in many ways, as a designer, user experience analyst, editorial policy mentor and content specialist. But I am proud to look at the attendance charts, because all the projects I have participated in in the last five years have managed to achieve enviable attendance results. I still own the social network GenSpot.com, which was once considered the largest Slovenian social network. Optionally, I deal with my own Start-Up project viralnewschart.com, which is only a few months old and requires a lot of my attention. I am already looking ahead and am slowly working more and more abroad.
Jan Macarol Vrabec has been dealing with online media for over ten years. He founded what was once the largest social network GenSpot.com, which he still owns today and co-created many online stories. When we ask him about his three favorite media portals, he says that it would be difficult to choose three that have convinced him the most in the recent period. Among the surprising stories he mentions NewsWeek, which stopped being published in print last year, as well as its last online adaptation. "If I had to choose and recommend a few titles, I would not go into the media waters. I use a simple web application in my work Trello.com for project management, which seems to me to be one of the simpler solutions. I use it to read the news viralnewschart.com, a proprietary product that tracks all the world's news and sources and then ranks them according to the number and weight of reactions on social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and Google+. I mainly use tools online that save me time and also help me in other ways with my productivity. But there are slowly too many of them..."
About the development of the Citymagazine.si website:
City Magazine's website came to life in a completely new image, "media culture" changed from print to digital. This is largely due to Jan Macarol Vrabec, who emphasizes ease of use, without distracting factors, with vertical contents endlessly down, colorful information and rubrics in a simple user experience as the central features of the new website. The site is philosophically and designally close to apps, which is what City Magazine will be in the future.
