It's Shorthand for good content design
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We use Shorthand to tell detailed, and highly visual, feature stories on our news website that deserve extra attention and which we believe will help engage our audience for longer than average. We have used it across news, sport, awards and lifestyle areas to give special treatment to a story. We use it to differentiate it from our opposition's approach to similar content. It offers a great way of using images and video to enhance a story.
Pros
- Enabling visual storytelling with multiple pictures
- Embedding rich media within a story, including video
- Engaging readers for longer than average dwell times
- Making it easy to create striking article design without coding experience
Cons
- Additional flexibility in how text is overlaid on pictures would be welcome so that there are more choices on what images to use with particular layouts
- Enabling users to control the path of text - for example, enabling runaround - could enable some excellent designs
- Adding additional section templates could speed up design
- More flexibility in caption placement would be helpful
Most Important Features
- Full-screen beautifully designed templates
- Flexibility in article design, without need for coding knowledge
- Ability to tailor for laptop and phone audiences
- Relative ease of use
Return on Investment
- Helped us create one of our top 10 most-read and most-shared stories in the last year
- Enabled us to elevate key pieces of content, boosting dwell time on our site
- But can also be time-consuming to adopt for some stories, meaning you need to choose well what stories really deserve the investment in time
- Boosted collaboration between teams via its ability to share, including offering the chance for others to preview content prior to publication
Other Software Used
Adobe PhotoShop, Adobe InDesign
