Tips for producing (good) content for mobile interfaces

By Bruno Rodrigues*

It is nothing new that the market and users have been signaling mobile first. In short, the days in which we could give ourselves the luxury of creating websites and portals only with the major desktop and notebook interfaces in mind are long gone.

Google had predicted it: With the increasing use of smartphones, the path forward must be the opposite; digital products must be designed, from inception, for the mobile medium and its smaller interfaces and objective content. Mirroring the users’ longings, brands, products, and services that do not want to lose a single position in search engine rankings have a lot of respect for each Google parameter.

So the game has turned: Content once produced for an environment where consumption was slower and more tranquil, went on to be planned to meet the demand for speed and convenience when accessing information.

I plunged into the mobile content production universe two years ago, attracted by the new reality at hand, a direct consequence of two decades of Webwriting, which I dedicate so much of my effort to, and which has resulted in three books on the subject.

However, UX Writing — creating content for mobile interfaces — was something virtually new, and, alongside my clients, I needed time to get a grasp on what was going on. It is an entirely new universe, ready for exploring, and a lot of questions have been asked since I began to study it.

How should the content be presented to an audience that checks it out while in movement, surrounded by visual and auditory stimuli that encourage dispersion? Is the content itself different from what is produced for the larger interfaces? What are the differences?

Here, then, is a list of conclusions that I have reached during this time, the outcome of conversations, observations, and search queries — and, yes, a lot of trial and error.

The mobile medium is here to offer solutions

Yes, you can read the mobile version of a news site on your smartphone, but we know that the great advantage of the mobile medium is the use of the applications. What we want the most on mobile is not to read, rather to check information. Nothing more practical than opening an app and having access to databases that deliver to us, in a matter seconds, the information we are looking for — not to mention services. After all, e-commerce changed after we gained the power to buy quickly over a smartphone. In other words, forget the reality of reading larger interfaces; what people want here is to have access to the solutions, no matter if what they need is to check something, buy something, or get entertainment.

Forget texts, embrace words

Forget the texts we were used to consuming on desktops and notebooks, there is no longer room for them. Yes, I literally mean screen real estate. Good mobile interface design favors words as the focus of written communication, not continuous text. Because the interface is small, what we want from textual content is guidance, and words take the lead in this task, pointing out paths for us to reach our goals. Here, writing is used to flag, not as conversation.

Images are relaxing

For at least a decade, as the way we consume information matured, we have been asking for much more content online. We want objective information, not subjectivity. In this process, we went on to think differently about images, and we demand they be not only in “landscape,” but have visual elements that work with the information. And so it has been — but not in the mobile environment. On the small interfaces where the effort to consume content is inversely proportional to size, images are not able to communicate as they do on our computers. In this scenario, photos and illustrations are relaxation elements. They serve as an oasis in the midst of an interface that demands a lot from our senses and, consequently, from our mental model.

The infographic is the king

A major exception in communicating through images, the infographic is the information element that points to the future of mobile interfaces. Emerging from the print media and popularized in the digital one — having taken the opposite direction, even revitalizing some print publications — infographics summarize visually information that, on other interfaces, would have been featured in a text. For such a limited environment, however, infographics provide a rare and powerful communication feature: They merge words and images into a single element, saving space and reasoning. Nothing beats infographics in the mobile medium; if you have to choose between one of them and text, no matter how small and objective, go for the infographic.

Videos, in the blink of an eye

There are two parallel universes when we talk about videos on the online medium: YouTube and videos embedded in websites, portals, blogs, and, now, apps. We are not talking about YouTube here, where you can watch feature films both on large or small interfaces. In this case, the point is precisely embedded videos, and why their duration should differ in larger and smaller interfaces. We have long known that a video should last no more than 1.5 minutes on desktops and notebooks. On the mobile environment, however, users are much more demanding: Videos should not last more than 30 seconds. I would go even further, though: Get used to the 15-second idea. Features such as Instagram Stories have made users used to very short content, and that is the direction videos have taken.

Forget creating knowledge — information is what counts here

In my almost daily quest to search the universe of information for the mobile medium, I usually work with the model I call the “T” of digital content. Allow me to explain: Websites and portals, with their vertical layered information structure, not only enable but also encourage the creation of knowledge when accessed through larger interfaces such as desktops and notebooks. We check out several pages of content in these environments, and from there, we form knowledge in accordance with our interest. This does not happen on mobile interface applications. We access apps to query, whether to undertake operations or search databases. The focus is pure and simple information, not building knowledge. The structure is horizontal, with no need for deepening. Neither reality is better or worse; both can and should live together. After all, users use both.

There is still a lot to discover about mobile content. What we are experiencing is but the beginning, and, to me, it has already become clear that observing initiatives of companies and brands in this scenario, especially the Brazilian ones — our reality — is essential to build parameters for quality in mobile content. Let us move on: We have a long way to go.

*Bruno Rodrigues is a consultant and teacher, a specialist in Information for Digital Media and Information Standardization, author of the first book on Webwriting in Portuguese, ‘Webwriting — Pensando o texto para a mídia digital’ (Webwriting — Conceiving text for the digital media) (2000), and its sequels, ‘Webwriting — Redação & Informação para a Web’ (Webwriting — Writing & Information for the Web) (2006) and ‘Webwriting — Redação para a Mídia Digital’ (Webwriting — Writing for the Digital Media) (2014). He produced for the Federal Government the Brazilian standard of online writing, ‘Padrões Brasil e-Gov: Cartilha de Redação Web’ (Brazil eGov Standards: Webwriting Guidebook) (2010), and is currently preparing a new book, this time on UX Writing (2019). In eighteen years, he has advised and provided training in Webwriting, UX Writing, and Information Architecture to almost 60 companies in Brazil and abroad.