Mobile content is twice as difficult
10 03 2011Jakob Nielsen brings about quite an interesting topic with the world turning to their mobile phones for nearly everything nowadays. Although this change is happening, people won’t be able to comprehend as much on their phone screens as they would on a computer.
The reasons are simple:
- Slower downloads
- No mouse for an easy selection
- Small screens, especially when compared to a computer screen
- Application UI’s lack consistency
“It’s much harder to understand complicated information when you’re reading through a peephole.”
I love this quote. It’s so true!
After an analysis that Nielsen did of Facebook‘s privacy policy featuring text that only people with at least one year of university education would find easy to read, the results were obvious:
- Desktop screen: 39.18% comprehension score
- Mobile screen: 18.93% comprehension score
In order for a text to be considered easy to read, the score must be above 60%, so even the desktop screen comprehension was only 2/3 of the desired amount.
This brings up all-important questions:
What makes mobile reading harder?
Why is it approximately twice as hard to understand complicated content when reading on the smaller screen?
The smaller screen.
- Because users see less at any given time than they would on a computer screen.
- Because users must move around the page more, needing to scroll around different pages rather than seeing it all right in front of them on a normal computer screen.
That’s why mobile reading is more difficult.
