Ruthlessly edit when writing for mobile

Imag­ine you have a den­tal appoint­ment and you arrive ear­ly. To kill the time, you might skim a copy of Newsweek that’s sit­ting in the wait­ing room. Or, if you are like mil­lions of peo­ple with a smart­phone, you might start perus­ing your e‑mail, surf­ing the Inter­net, or see­ing what’s new on Facebook.

Usabil­i­ty guru Jakob Nielsen com­plet­ed research that shows con­sumers are using mobile phones as time killers, per­fect for when you have five min­utes to spare. The same study also showed that peo­ple are impa­tient with any­thing that’s per­ceived as “ver­bosi­ty.”

In a typ­i­cal news­pa­per arti­cle, it’s not uncom­mon for a reporter to inter­view two to four sources when writ­ing about a nat­ur­al dis­as­ter, such as a hur­ri­cane. When con­sumers are read­ing the hur­ri­cane sto­ry on a mobile phone, they per­ceive those extra view­points as extraneous.

What does all this mean for tech­ni­cal writ­ers? If you’re writ­ing any con­tent that will be appear on a mobile phone, con­sumers want writ­ers to get to the point quickly.

It seems that peo­ple want less and less con­tent. Years ago, Nielsen rec­om­mend­ed that if you write 500 words for a print­ed doc­u­ment, prune that same mes­sage to 250 words when it’s read online. This lat­est study seems to sug­gest that we should be even more ruth­less when it comes to sum­ma­riz­ing our main messages.

It’s not sur­pris­ing that peo­ple want key mes­sages, not lengthy, nuanced expo­si­tion. Many North Amer­i­cans are feel­ing inun­dat­ed with infor­ma­tion, suf­fer­ing from “infobe­si­ty” (see my ear­li­er arti­cle about the top­ic). Many North Amer­i­cans also strug­gle with literacy—Canada has an illit­er­ate and semi­lit­er­ate pop­u­la­tion esti­mat­ed at 42 per­cent of the whole, a pro­por­tion that mir­rors that of the U.S. We’re also dis­tract­ed. It’s not uncom­mon to be “spend­ing time” with some­one when they’re furtive­ly star­ing down at their iPhone or Blackberry.

Like it or loathe it, more and more peo­ple are using smart­phones to get their infor­ma­tion. If you’re writ­ing online assis­tance for mobile users, you need to sum­ma­rize your mes­sages down to bite-sized chunks. Joe Welinske, the pres­i­dent of Writ­er­sUA, recent­ly wrote a series of webi­na­rs about mobile user assis­tance. In his book Devel­op­ing User Assis­tance For Mobile Apps, Welinske writes, “The sin­gle most impor­tant thing I have learned in my work with mobile apps is that bring­ing over Help designs from desk­top appli­ca­tions is a real­ly bad idea.”

So when you’re author­ing con­tent for a mobile envi­ron­ment, be ruth­less with your edit­ing. Imag­ine you are writ­ing for Twitter.

Here’s the full arti­cle about Nielsen’s research.