In our previous blog on mobile strategy, I made this statement: Your organization has a responsibility to deliver an equal content experience across all devices. I’d like to correct myself and substitute the phrase “equal content” with “congruent content.” The difference here is important. “Equal content,” to me, means “the same content.” “Congruent content” means consistent information about your products and services, but not necessarily served up in exactly the same way.
Your goal is to create adaptive content. Adaptive content fits different screen sizes and can be presented differently in a variety of formats. A good analogy is to think of the same data able to be presented in pie charts, line graphs, and bar graphs. Adaptive content is generous portions of your information organized in manageable chunks.
WHY Adaptive?
The user of a smart phone doesn’t necessarily use a mobile app for the same reason that she/he accesses a mobile site. As mobile strategists, our challenge is to anticipate what the user might want to do and anticipate her/his behavior to provide information that answers their need/question/timeframe.
Your mobile site needs to yield information in more abbreviated chunks than your regular website. Mobile apps should be geared toward creating an “experience.” That’s because users access mobile apps with an expectation of a high degree of interactivity.
HOW Adaptive?
The challenge of developing a mobile content strategy is figuring out how to marry the message to the medium. It helps to start by thinking in slices: Presentation, Platform and Information.
Your Presentation Slice looks at what information you’re going to put where—a website, mobile site, or mobile app. Your mobile strategy here should answer questions about what tasks the user is likely to perform, depending on which device they are using. Looking at current traffic and time on page analytics can help you identify behaviors your users are performing on your website.
Your Platform Slice looks at what types of web services and systems are available to communicate and connect your content to various devices. Some examples of platforms would be operating systems, software frameworks and program languages. The goal here is to create an optimized network of communications between and across systems and platforms so that the user’s experience is simple and seamless. This step primarily involves your web developers reviewing and recommending your best options.
Your Information Slice includes all of your data and content that your users are looking to access. Here’s where the skill of repurposing content becomes valuable. The visual image that comes to mind is creating a “reduction” in the kitchen. When boiling down the ingredients of a sauce or marinade to reduce the volume, you are left with a highly seasoned and concentrated liquid. This is what you want to do with your mobile content. By paring down to the essentials you are making your content easier to read and to remember.
WHERE to Start?
Adopting a ‘”mobile first” mindset is a critical starting point. From this point forward, make sure you are writing for mobile:
- Organize information in chunks
- Keep paragraphs short
- Use graphics
- Use bullets and bolded text
Go back and sort through the rest of your communications and organize with this same mindset. One idea for developing your naming hierarchy to organize your content is to start with your website keywords.
Now, when your executive team is ready for mobile, you will be too!
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