Smartphone News Consumption: Implications for creating smartphone content
24th November 2010
News Consumption - Does the communication channel affect how we consume information and how effectively we retain it?
Role of the internet in news consumption
According to a recent study, the Internet is now the third most popular classic news communication channel, trailing behind local and national television but ahead of newspapers and radio broadcasts. Almost two-thirds of people get news from both online and offline sources according to a report (Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism report). People who get daily news from a single source now account for a very small proportion, according to the report. These days news of course comes in many forms – classic articles, RSS feeds and personal news, via twitter and blogs.
The Internet hasn't become just another medium for news consumption, it has also changed how people interact with news. The report found that 33% of mobile owners now access news from their phone and that 28% of Internet users have customized their home page to show news topics of personal interest.
With the number of communications channels through which people are regularly accessing news increasing, for World Usability Day we wanted to explore whether people consume and retain information differently, depending upon what was used to read it.
Study background and results
In order to explore these differences, we asked the sixteen participants in our study to read an article in the Guardian newspaper, on the Guardian iPhone app and on the Guardian website. Four questions were developed for each article, based upon content within them, to test recall and retention.
The chart shows for each article, the percentage of questions that were answered correctly.
Figure Two: % of the four questions answered correctly
Half of the questions from the Guardian newspaper article and the website were answered correctly, with one person reading each getting all four questions correct. However, just one in five (21%) of the questions taken from the Guardian iPhone app article was correct, with no-one answering all four correctly.
So it seems that levels of retention and recall are higher when reading an article in the newspaper and on the website compared to reading an article on an iPhone app. So what might explain this?
In discussions with those taking part, it seems that many people do not read articles in a newspaper and on the web in what we might describe as the conventional way – from the start all the way to the finish. As all, or much of, the article is available at a glance people rarely read from the first paragraph right through to the final one. Instead, participants described how they scanned the entire content to ‘get the gist’ of the story, before starting to read more detail. But as well as scanning ahead, many of the participants in the test explained how they actually returned to previous paragraphs to corroborate newly captured information or to check up on something they had read earlier.
This scanning ahead and returning to re-read previous paragraphs might help us to absorb details. This is less easy to do when reading an iPhone application, which shows much less of the content on screen at any moment in time. From observation, every participant read the iPhone app in an identical way – starting at the top and scrolling through to the end, without ever scanning forward or returning to previously read content.
The larger field of view afforded us by the newspaper and website articles allows us to take in more of the detail, by scanning ahead and checking back on the content. The very narrow field of view afforded us by the iPhone app article may explain why the levels of information retention and recall were so much poorer.
Interestingly, the constant scrolling required for the iPhone app led people to think the article was significantly longer than both the website and the newspaper article, but it was actually longer by only a few words.
Implications for content writing for smartphones
So what does this mean for those producing content? Well, the first key lesson is that it is not sufficient to replicate website content on a smartphone and expect users to absorb the same amount of detail. There is much evidence available on how to write content for the web, but this exercise would indicate that new lessons apply when producing content for the screen sizes of today’s mobile devices. We have long understood that website users tend to skim read text-heavy pages, but at least they have the opportunity to scan ahead and return to previously read content. With the smartphone app, users seem to skim read in a similar way, but take in less information as they are denied the ‘scan ahead’ and ‘check behind’ opportunities because of the narrow field of view.
Here are some top tips for writing content for a smartphone:
- Keep content short – material seems longer when read on a smartphone;
- Start with a small font size to show more content on the screen to facilitate scanning; Users will be able to change the font size on their device should they wish to;
- Write in inverse pyramid style – start with the key information and broaden out from there;
- Provide clearly delineated sections to aid scanning and sign-posting.
I would like to take this chance to thank all of those who attended World Usability Day 2010 at User Vision and particularly to those who took part in this study. Special congratulations to the two people who answered all four questions on one of the articles correctly. You know who you are!
User Vision runs a mobile usability training course
, in which delegates learn about user needs from mobile website and the key principles for designing a useable mobile website.
What can you do next?
- Read some more usability and accessibility articles.
- Find out how usability testing can improve your offering.
- Explore our mobile usability services
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This article was written by Simon Duke . Simon is a Senior Usability Consultant at User Vision,a usability and accessibility consultancy that helps clients gain a competitive advantage through improved ease of use.
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