Tech Blog – Mobile Content Is Twice as Difficult March 10, 2011
Posted by acusumano in : Assignments , 2 commentsQuick question before we begin: how are you reading this blog entry?
- Did you print out a hard copy?
- Are you reading it on your computer?
- Checking it out on your mobile device?
Those are three top options, listed in descending order of how likely you are to retain the content you read.
While I highly doubt that anyone is eagerly loading up a blog for an online journalism course on their iPhone, it is a bit discomforting to read that, as technology expands by shrinking, the power of the word may be shrinking as well.
Reading retention, thy name is futility.
Jacob Nielsen summed up a study in which University of Alberta researchers determined that reading from mobile devices results in less than half the retention of reading from a computer screen (which itself is only about a quarter of the retention from a printed page).
Nielsen points to several factors on his blog…of course, chances are that readers will miss out on 73 percent of it, which appears to be the ignored portion on text-heavy sites such as user agreements.
- Mobile devices are slower to download
- There isn’t a physical keyboard or mouse
- The screen is much smaller and text is either tinier or there is less of it on screen
- Not all sites are properly formatted for mobile devices
