Mobile content is water
Today I read in Karen Pate’s personal profile an interesting quote that resonates with my latest researchs on responsive design and the multi channel world of mobility.
Basically she defines content as water: “content comes in all shapes and sizes, has many uses and flows everywhere. A content strategy is similar to how we’ve handled water: we must figure out to harness and distribute it, make it portable, and help it get used and consumed”.
Personally I think it is one of the smartest definitions of content and content strategy I’ve heard so far, and makes me think in several ideas that are directly related to the mobile strategy.
Mobile content, content you create to be displayed in multiple displays and devices, is hard to design. Maybe due to our previous experiences creating more static content when we knew the device we were designing for (“optimized for 800x600 resolution screens”, remember?). But in the mobile era, when you don’t know the “recipient”, you need to change your mindset, being prepared for the unknown. A GPS display? A 50' screen? A tablet? Your content needs to be prepared to flow.
Water is needed for human life, but it can also be devastating. I’ve seen mobile sites that “squeeze” all their desktop’s information, prepared to be displayed on big screens, into 3' displays with an infinite scroll down bar. Sometimes, when the amount of information is not crazy, it is fine, but content in huge amounts, like water, can kill you. Mobile content management should take the amount of information in consideration as a way to measure quality. This will make us focus on what is really important, and deliver that crucial content to our users and customers.
It is not the same to drink water from a fountain than from a bottle or from a glass. On the mobile world, it is not the same to navigate using 4G in a city than navigating somewhere in the middle of the countryside: how does your users experience navigating your site on one of those super slow connections? Are you sure there is no alternative to your awesome 1,5GB video? How much business opportunities are you loosing because of your site not being prepared for slow connections?
When your users go to the countryside for a picnic, if they don’t know wether they’re going to have water or not, they bring water bottles with them. Mobile users are also used to that: when they are on the go without internet connection, they save content to access it offline (see my loved Pocket, Evernote, Drive, Dropbox…). One important question: how easy is it to consume your content offline?
As we can see, there are so many things we need to improve! We are still far away from being able to provide the optimal mobile experience we can envision. Let’s make sure the industry moves forward into solving these problems for our users. I’ll do my best.
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