Three Challenges of Writing for Mobile

Now that Android is the lead­ing oper­at­ing sys­tem used to con­nect to the Inter­net, tech­ni­cal writ­ers need to seri­ous­ly look at how their con­tent is being dis­played on smart­phones and tablets.

For years, smart­phone and tablet use has sky­rock­et­ed.  In 2016, the num­ber of smart­phone users was expect­ed to sur­pass 2 bil­lion (source: eMar­keter). Sim­i­lar­ly, there are about 1.5 bil­lion peo­ple who are expect­ed to use a tablet by 2019 (source: eMar­keter). Ear­li­er this year, Android has edged out Win­dows as the num­ber one oper­at­ing sys­tem used to access the Inter­net.

Mean­while, tech­ni­cal writ­ers appear to be slow to embrace mobile. In one study com­plet­ed last year of more than 700 tech­ni­cal com­mu­ni­ca­tion pro­fes­sion­als, only 24 per­cent of tech­ni­cal writ­ers pub­lish con­tent that would be con­sid­ered “mobile ready.”

Although there may be an unde­ni­able user demand for every­thing mobile, prepar­ing con­tent has its share of challenges.

Challenge Number One: Small Screen

In spite of the mod­ern trend towards larg­er-screen phones, what makes mobile phones so con­ve­nient and portable is their small size. Com­pared with desk­top and even lap­top screens, phone screens accom­mo­date a lot less content—see the fol­low­ing illus­tra­tion com­par­ing the sizes of mon­i­tors, tablets, and smartphones.

As a result, mobile users must work hard­er to access the same infor­ma­tion and rely on their short-term mem­o­ry to refer to infor­ma­tion that is not vis­i­ble on the screen.

One way to mit­i­gate users’ small screens is to embrace brevi­ty. One usabil­i­ty con­sul­tant rec­om­mend­ed that if you write 100 words for a print-based doc­u­ment, con­sid­er writ­ing 50 words for the web. For mobile, aim to reduce the word count even more.

Challenge Number Two: Comprehension

Jakob Nielsen, a usabil­i­ty con­sul­tant, has per­formed some stud­ies on user com­pre­hen­sion lev­els on mobile devices.

In a recent study, he found that, on aver­age, com­pre­hen­sion scores were slight­ly high­er when users read the arti­cles on mobile devices. How­ev­er, dif­fi­cult con­tent may cause low­er com­pre­hen­sion on mobile.

The dif­fi­cul­ty of the arti­cles (“easy” or “hard”) was deter­mined by the num­ber of words and the dif­fi­cul­ty of the lan­guage used (accord­ing to the Flesch-Kin­caid read­ing-lev­el for­mu­la). All of the arti­cles were pre­sent­ed as HTML pages cre­at­ed from the same sim­ple design template.

Easy pas­sages were read about as fast on both devices, but hard pas­sages actu­al­ly took longer to read on a mobile device ver­sus a com­put­er.  Easy arti­cles were about 400 words and writ­ten at a Grade 8 lev­el. Hard arti­cles were just under 1,000 arti­cles and at a Grade 12 level.

I would argue that tech­ni­cal com­mu­ni­ca­tion would typ­i­cal­ly fall into the hard category.

The take­away for me is again to sim­pli­fy your con­tent and to get to the point. You’re ask­ing a lot if you write a 1,000-word arti­cle when you know that some users will be read­ing the con­tent on a 5‑inch screen.

Challenge Number Three: Distraction Levels

Smart­phones have rev­o­lu­tion­ized how we live. But as mobile phones are portable, we are more like­ly to be inter­rupt­ed when using them. Nielsen notes that the aver­age user may be using a desk­top for more than 150 sec­onds while the aver­age mobile ses­sion dura­tion is just 72 seconds.

Nielsen rec­om­mends:

• Allow users to save his­to­ry, as well as to email or share infor­ma­tion with them­selves or others.
• Pri­or­i­tize what is essen­tial on a page and sim­pli­fy tasks and inter­ac­tions. Because atten­tion is frag­ment­ed, strive to show users what they need as soon as possible.

As users are more and more like­ly to read tech­ni­cal com­mu­ni­ca­tion on a mobile device, it’s an excit­ing time for tech­ni­cal writ­ers to learn new skills and approaches.