News homepage on a tablet and smartphone customised for a user in Shropshire

Back in March I wrote about the relaunch of the BBC News mobile site.

Since then, my development team has been busy adding new features and functionality. Our latest update is particularly exciting because smartphone users in the UK can now personalise the news homepage with local news and weather. You can search by town or postcode, or if you phone supports it, you can use the "Use my location" button.

From then on, the news homepage will remember your settings and will give you the weather forecast for the next few hours, in three-hourly chunks, as well as the top headlines in your local area. You can easily change your settings to pick up a new location.

I'm really pleased with this new addition as it's something you've particularly been asking us for.

The BBC News development team, based in Broadcasting House in London, works in an iterative development style, using research and data to inform the next priorities. We're always aiming to ensure we are adding real improvements for our users, so your feedback is really important to us.

Since March we have also:

• improved the navigation so you can more easily find news sections such as Business, Technology, Health and so on
• made it easier to find related news articles, including analysis from our top correspondents
• added the ability to share a story using email, Facebook & Twitter (more improvements still to come)
• improved our Live pages so it's even easier to follow the latest and breaking developments on a big story
• made layout improvements for portrait and landscape viewing on all mobiles

We're working on further improvements for mobile and tablet users. We're using an innovative approach called responsive design, to offer an optimised experience across a range of devices, from basic mobiles through to the very latest smartphones and tablets. Eventually this approach will also extend to the desktop browser. Our aim is to offer the same BBC News content across devices, while making the most of their multiple screen sizes and capabilities.

If you're interested in finding out more, my boss Chris Russell, has explained the thinking behind the responsive design approach.

I hope you like the changes so far. Please let me know, by commenting on this post or sending an email to mobile@bbc.co.uk.

Kate Milner, Mobile Product Manager for News, Future Media

Responsive design means that the mobile BBC News site can adapt to different devices

I’m Kate Milner, mobile product manager for BBC News. I’m pleased to tell you that today we relaunched the BBC News mobile website for audiences in the UK and around the world.

The new-look site is designed to work on a range of mobile devices and screen sizes, whether your phone is a touchscreen one or whether you use a keypad or trackball. Now when you browse the mobile site, what you see will be tailored to the device you have in your hand, for example the way you move around the news sections and the number of images you see.

You can visit the new site on your mobile at m.bbc.co.uk/news.

I’ve been working with a talented team of developers and designers to deliver this new product and today is just the start of a number of improvements we plan to offer to make it easier for you to access BBC News on a range of mobile devices.

We’re improving our coverage of live news stories for all mobile users. The live page format offers short form updates related to big stories as they unfold, for example on stories like the Budget and global news events.

Right now, not all of our BBC News content works perfectly on your mobile, but we’ve got lots of plans. Over the coming weeks and months we’ll be adding more features and functionality.

We’ll be offering a simple way to add Weather and Local News to your front page and we will provide an easy way for you to share stories with your friends and social networks. We have temporarily removed the current sharing options while we work on an improved version and we’ll introduce that soon.

Of course, many of you are using devices that are capable of far more than we are offering today. Currently there isn’t any video, but we will add video for those devices which can display it.

As the editor of the BBC News website, Steve Herrmann, notes, in an average week, the BBC News sites and apps are visited by around 9.7m users worldwide on mobile and tablet devices. That represents about 26% of the total users coming to the BBC News website and this is growing.

We know that people want different things at different times - sometimes you’re looking for quick updates and at other times you want more detailed news coverage. Our new mobile site will be aiming to do both.

Although predictions vary as to when it will happen, at some point the number of people accessing the internet on the mobiles will overtake those on desktops.

This is why we are working towards a truly optimised BBC News browsing experience across a range of devices, including mobile, tablet, PC and internet-connected TVs.

At the moment mobile users are accessing BBC News in different ways – via the mobile site, the PC/desktop site and via our iPhone and Android apps.

Maintaining separate websites for these many different devices is costly and time-consuming. So, to solve that problem, we’re using an innovative approach known as responsive design. This will allow us to offer the same BBC News content across devices, while making the most of their multiple screen sizes and capabilities. My boss, Chris Russell, explains the thinking behind the responsive design approach.

I hope you enjoy using the new site. Please let me know what you think by commenting on this post, using the #bbcnews tag on Twitter or emailing us at mobile@bbc.co.uk.

We can’t always reply individually but we do read all feedback.

Kate Milner, Mobile Product Manager for News, Future Media

Mock up of the BBC News App on a generic Android tablet

I’m delighted to announce that BBC News app for Android is now available for large tablet devices. The app is available to download from the Android Market in the UK.

BBC Worldwide will soon be launching an international version of the app for audiences around the world.

This follows the success of the BBC News app for Android smartphones, which has been downloaded more than three million times globally since launching last year  

It offers a simple way of navigating through the key news sections in both landscape and portrait mode.

You can personalise these to suit your interests; we’ve made it easy to share stories and the app also provides On Demand video within stories, in both 3G and wi-fi.

We’ll be offering the News Channel live in a later release. We’re also working on homescreen widgets.

Growing numbers of people are accessing BBC News on mobiles and tablets. In an average week, the BBC News sites and apps are visited by around 9.7m users worldwide on mobile and tablet devices. That represents about 26% of the total.

The BBC News product development team will be working on further mobile and tablet improvements over the coming year.

Thanks for your continued comments and star ratings. Please let us know what you think of the Android tablet app underneath this post, or via the #bbcapps hashtag.

Kate Milner, Mobile Product Manager for News, Future Media

Android Phones. Picture by Tom Purves, used under CC licence

I'm pleased to announce that we have released an update to the BBC News app for Android devices. The update will be available to download from the Android Market in the UK from today.

We've really appreciated your feedback since we launched the app in May. In response to your comments, the update offers:

• Homescreen widgets - offering you an at-a-glance view of the headlines, directly on your Android homescreen
• Improved personalisation - as well as adding and removing news categories, you can now reorder the categories to suit your preferences
• Ability to store the app on the SD card (widgets will not be available if you choose to use this feature).

We have also added the ability to send stories, video, and photos directly to the BBC News team. If you capture a news event, either as a photograph or video, then please send it to BBC News.

To add a widget to your Android homescreen, find an available space on your screen and then long-press to bring up a list of available widgets. Choose from BBC News (large) or BBC News (small), then choose which news category you want to display. The widgets offer a quick glance at the latest headlines directly on your device's homescreen.

The BBC News app for Android also now offers the ability to store the app on the SD card, a key feature that Android users have been asking for. Android apps are installed by default to the device's internal storage but as you add more and more apps you can run out of storage space, so we have given you the option of moving the app to the SD card. If you choose to use this new feature the widgets will not be available; this is a feature of Android that is outside our control, but as many people have been asking for SD card storage we wanted to give the choice.

The BBC News app for Android has been downloaded more than two million times globally. We're really pleased the app has been so well received. Thanks for your continued comments and star ratings. Please let us know what you think of the latest update underneath this post, or via the #bbcapps hashtag.

Kate Milner is Mobile Product Manager for News. She reports to Anthony Sullivan, the overall Product Manager for News, within Phil Fearnley's Future Media News and Knowledge Group.

It's been just over a month since we relaunched the BBC News and Sport mobile sites and we're already seeing the benefits, both for our audience and for the journalists.

The key benefit is that we've dramatically improved the publishing speeds. The mobile site is now published directly from the same Journalism Content Production System used to publish the desktop site. It means the mobile site gets the latest updates at the same time as the desktop site - absolutely crucial for breaking news and during live sporting events.

Sport is extremely important to our mobile audience and we know that Saturday afternoons are a key time, when football fans in particular want up-to-date scores and live text commentary on how their team is doing.

The move into CPS publishing means the Sport journalists can now easily manage the mobile content, to make sure the most relevant stories and stats are highlighted.

For example, during Formula 1 events, a journalist adds the Live Leaderboard to a prominent position on the mobile site, so people wanting quick updates on their phone don't have to spend ages hunting around for the key information.

The Sports desk is trying out a similar approach by highlighting Live Scores during key football matches. And with the Ashes approaching, cricket fans can also expect to find the latest scores at their fingertips.

As senior software engineer Paul Caporn will explain in a forthcoming post it was a huge task to migrate the mobile site from one publishing system to another and make changes to the content output. My role was to keep the audience needs at the forefront and to ensure that the new mobile site was easy for journalists to manage.

Journalists have to manage multiple outputs, including the web, Ceefax and Digital Text, so it was vital that we didn't create unnecessary extra work for them. The system had to be able to run itself for the most part, yet it also needed to be flexible for when extra editorial work is needed.

On the News side of things, this flexible approach means there is now more scope for journalists to respond quickly to big news stories, as the BBC News website's editor, Steve Herrmann points out.

And as my colleague Gavin Gibbons explained recently , this is just the beginning. Future plans include an improved sports stats service and more mobile video and audio.

Kate Milner is Product Manager, Mobiles, BBC Future Media and Technology, Journalism