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What you are missing about mobile – Rachel Johnston

Delivering content to mobile is a challenge, but also an opportunity, explains Rachel Johnston.

This article was published originally in Communicator (Winter 2014). Communicator is the authoritative, award winning, journal for UK technical communicators. It is home to high quality, objective, and peer-reviewed features – current, relevant, and in-depth.

Delivering technical content to mobile can be challenging, but it is also a huge opportunity for the technical communications community. First, though, we have to let go of some widely held misconceptions.

Even big companies get it wrong

A friend recently asked me to help her fix her broadband connection. Round at her house, I tried a few basics, but I’m not a networking expert and I had to resort to the online help. The part of the telecoms provider’s website devoted to broadband troubleshooting was not mobile-friendly at all, and as I pinched and zoomed and right-swiped my way through the content I wondered how a company that routinely delivers multi-screen, multi-device content could get this so badly wrong. We ended up calling technical support because, despite an obvious use case for delivering content to a mobile device (broken broadband and generous 3G allowance) I could not get to anything useful.

A few months later I came across an article exposing NHS England’s investment in iPhones and iPads for clerical and managerial staff. While many of the comments in the thread recognised that it made sense for employers to invest in mobile technology, many commenters were concerned that public money was being spent on ‘Facebook and Candy Crush Saga’.

If you have tried to get funding or resources to deliver your user assistance content to mobile, that may be an attitude that is familiar to you. Even now, many organisations see mobile content delivery as an optional extra, to be looked at at some unspecified time in the future once all other business is ‘out of the way’. Which, of course, it never is.

Mobile: disruptive innovation

Seeing mobile devices as irrelevant trinkets is an attitude that’s going to hold us back. Smartphones and tablets are a disruptive innovation, the term created by the academic Clayton Christensen to describe the process where “a product or service takes root initially in simple applications at the bottom of a market and then relentlessly moves up market, eventually displacing established competitors”. When Microsoft put ‘a computer on every desktop’ those computers were not necessarily more powerful than their predecessors, but they were cheaper, more widely available, easier to use. It changed everything and not all businesses survived. Once we stop seeing mobile devices as expensive phones and start seeing them as cheap computers with capabilities way beyond our desktop machines, the significance becomes huge.

In healthcare, particularly, m-health (1) is a growing field, enabling, for example, doctors in the developing world to take ultrasounds without the need for expensive equipment or even mains electricity. Mining companies are using employees’ mobile phones to track their location, keep them safe and to deliver the content they need for the equipment they are working on. In a recent survey, 72% of manufacturing companies supported the idea of BYOD,– Bring Your Own Device. Rather than invest in providing devices to employees, it can actually be more cost-effective to use the smartphones and tablets that employees already have and provide the content they need. That means technical content: hard, complex, industrial and engineering content, delivered to a multitude of devices with complete parity.

(1) m-health is an abbreviation for mobile health, a term used for the practice of medicine and public health supported by mobile devices. (Source: Wikipedia, accessed November 2014)

Where do you start?

Even with buy-in from management though, where to start? Technical writing teams are often under-staffed and under-resourced, working flat out to deliver on their current commitments. The tools and technologies can seem overwhelming and out of reach of smaller teams. But making a start does not have to be that difficult. One smartphone manufacturer began working on their mobile user assistance with just 27 hand-coded ‘How-to’s’, gradually developing new content and new content structures until they were able to build a fully functioning app.

There are many considerations that inform whether to develop a mobile site, an app, or a hybrid site for your content (and too many to discuss here), but whatever the decision there are affordable off-the-shelf options. App builders such as Bootstrap or Appery.io are increasingly easy to use, require no software development knowledge, and some of them even have great documentation! Many of the proprietary Help Authoring Tools also have the capabilities to output mobile-friendly content out of the box.

So, the motivation is there, and the tools are available, but what are the implications of mobile delivery for the actual content?

Nice app, shame about the content

It is easy to see mobile content as a front-end developer’s problem: getting the mechanics of a responsive web design or an app working as they should. But carelessly pouring content into a responsive template can make it meaningless, especially if the content still contains contextual pointers such as ‘Above’, ‘below’, ‘see illustration to the left’ because in a responsive template we do not always know whether something is above, below or to the left. A great user interface is important, but it won’t rescue confusing or outdated content.

So, preparing for mobile gives us an opportunity to take a really close look at the content on offer, to weed out what is redundant, verbose or flabby. Luke Wrobleswki, author of Mobile First makes the point that ‘There is no mobile content: just good content’.

On the go, or on the couch?

Our first instinct is often to think about what content we can cut out, based on two preconceptions: the idea that people do not want to read long-form content on small screens, and the idea that mobile users are always on the go, busy and distracted and unable to digest more than a teaspoon of information at any one time. That was fine while the desktop remained the primary means of access to content, but the number of mobile-only users is growing all the time. In the next decade, affordable mobile technology will give 2–3 billion people internet access for the first time. If your content needs to reach young people, or to people in the developing world, or people on low incomes, then the expectation is that they will be able to get to your content through their mobile devices. As authors, we no longer get to decide what devices are ‘right’ for our content: the user does. The answer cannot be less content, it has to be more structure.

There is also increasing evidence that people will accept long-form content, as long as it is useful and relevant. Up-down scrolling is a gesture that most users are happy with, and users are more annoyed by apparently arbitrary ‘page’ breaks. For our archetypal ‘on the go’ mobile user on a potentially erratic signal, having to reconnect and download individual pages is much more annoying than needing to up-swipe a few times. As mobile-only connectivity grows, more people are choosing to read long-form content. A survey found that 25 million people in China only read books on their phones, suggesting that if the unit of information is the right size, long-form content poses no problems, even on a small device.

The tiny chunks myth

The principles of structured authoring, DITA or otherwise, encourage us to think about content in ‘chunks’, but writing in chunks is not the same as delivering in chunks. Jakob Neilsen describes the ‘letterbox effect’ that makes it more difficult for users to orient themselves when viewing content on a small screen. So if our chunking is too visible to the user, making them negotiate an excessively deep hierarchy, that can actually impair the mobile content experience. It is almost like a code bleed, showing the consumer too much of the nuts and bolts of the content model.

Browse is crucial

But why put so much thought into information architecture? If the content is there, surely users can search for it. Actually, research shows that users tend to be terrible at search, and even suggests that we are getting worse at it. Research by the Nielsen Norman group found that “Most users are unable to solve even halfway-complicated problems with search”. On many mobile devices, this problem is compounded, with imperfect touch-screens and small keyboards making even the most skilful searcher error-prone. We can mitigate this problem with features such as ‘best guess’ and autocomplete, but for technical assistance content particularly, search is hard because the user is searching a small data set. ‘Just make it work like Google’ may be a familiar request, but Google works because of its 1,000,000,000 gigabyte index and the many millions of computing hours that have gone into its development. Searching is always important, but so is browsing and your information architecture needs to support both.

Mobile superpowers

For all the challenges that mobile presents, it is also a huge opportunity. Mobile devices also have capabilities way beyond the desktop machine, such as the ability to sense their surroundings, measure accurately, record and share visual and audio information. How much better could we support users if we really put our minds to exploiting these ‘superpowers’?

For authors, perhaps the most significant opportunity is personalisation. It has always been hard to get enough information from our users to provide information that is relevant to them. We use our best judgement on what a user needs to know, but all too often we are flying blind. But mobile devices are inherently personal: by delivering content to mobile we can gather very deep insights about user behaviour and preference. The fact that a mobile device is so personal to its owner means that we can use it to deliver content that is relevant to their location, previous behaviour age, social group or job role. That does not have to be an exercise in ‘big data’. Many smartphones, for example, can use activity data held on the device to feed user assistance also held on the device to support users at an appropriate time. For example, the music management app may suggest help on creating a playlist until the user has completed that activity. Once the user has taken the advice on offer, the tip no longer appears.

Summary

The mobile revolution is really just getting started – and we need to start thinking about it now – not just about mobile content as a problem to be contained but as an opportunity to raise the profile of the profession and deliver better, more personal experiences to users.

References and resources

Rachel Johnston is a content strategy consultant for Mekon, helping businesses face the challenges of mobile content and to embrace its opportunities.

E: rachel.johnston@mekon.com
Tw: @Thedessertfox