The new mobile homepage reflects the design of the homepage on desktops

I’m proud to announce the mobile homepage has come out of its Beta mode into a full launch and is now available at m.bbc.co.uk.

The old mobile homepage wasn’t meeting our users increased needs and expectations. We wanted to improve this experience and bring it more in line with the desktop version which launched at the end of last year.

You can read the full rationale behind the product, market context and also the key features in my last blog post.

Feedback from Beta

During the beta period we were able to track usage and could see how people were using the product. Hundreds of thousands of people have visited the page and were able to see that of our beta test users, a third used the location setting and one in nine customised their content.

Thanks so much for the feedback, which was mostly positive.

We had lots of comments via emails, blog posts and across social media; all of these were collated and reviewed and where possible new functionality has been developed to help us improve the product.

There was an immediate need for further customisation options. We received 20 direct emails, as well as blog post comments like that of Egg of Maidstone:

I want several items of local news, UK news, world news, technology news, entertainment news, sport news, football news and, most importantly, My Club news. Instead I'm stuck with a couple of "news" items, a couple of "local news" items and some random sports news.

The most popular requests were Technology and F1, which we have added.

We also plan to launch additional options such as Radio 1 and Things To Do in the coming months.

We also decided that all links to elsewhere in the BBC should go to other mobile sites, as FoolOnTheHill suggested:

However, they currently link to the non-mobile version of the pages - I assume this is not as intended...

So, what else is new?

As well as new customisation options and changing the links, other new features which have been added to the BBC Mobile Homepage based on audience feedback include:

Location auto detect – Automatically detecting your location to bring you local news and weather.
Breaking news and sport - Introducing these modes allows us to ensure we are delivering the top stories quickly to our audience
Four column layout – this will offer a better experience for users on new wider screen phones

Tell us what you think

As always I’d like to know your thoughts so please post a constructive comment under this blog, or tell us what you think on Twitter using the #bbchomepage hashtag.

Eleni Sharp is the Product Manager of the BBC Mobile Homepage