Introduction

INTRODUCTION

THERE’S NO SUCH THING as content strategy for mobile.

Wait! Don’t throw the book away yet!

There is such a thing as a content strategy that plans for how you’ll publish and maintain your content across all these new and emerging platforms: smartphones and tablets, sure, but also smart TVs, refrigerators, in-car audio systems—even the desktop web. But “holistic enterprise content strategy” just doesn’t have the same ring to it, right? Mobile’s the buzzword on everyone’s lips right now, so that’s the label we’ve slapped on this problem.

When we talk about content strategy for mobile, we’re not talking about publishing different content to be read on smartphones. That wouldn’t be much of a strategy—who can afford to create content for only one platform? If content strategy means developing a plan for how you will create, deliver, maintain, and govern your content, then content strategy for mobile looks at the special challenges in getting your content onto a variety of devices, screen sizes, and platforms—including mobile web, native apps for iOS, Android and Windows, and, yup, even the desktop.

When we talk about content strategy for mobile, we’re also not talking about delivering content to serve the “mobile context.” “Mobile” seemingly implies motion, mobility. We imagine a hurried businesswoman, dashing through the airport, glancing at the screen out of the corner of one eye. But like the “dial” tone, the “return” key, and “cut and paste,” the word “mobile” has expanded to mean something different from its analogue in the physical world. Anyone who’s ever pecked at his mobile phone from the couch, too lazy to walk over to his desktop computer just a few feet away, knows exactly what we’re talking about. Anyone who’s ever waited for hours in that same airport, passing the time transfixed by a tiny glowing screen, knows the same thing. “Mobile” doesn’t necessarily mean you’re on the move.

If mobile doesn’t imply a specific device or a specific context, then what does it mean? The only thing it really tells us is that the user isn’t seated at a computer, with all that tells us about the interaction model. With a desktop machine, we can assume the user has a monitor, and we can know with almost total certainty that the monitor has a resolution of 1024×768 pixels or higher. We can assume the user has a pointer, controlled by an external pointing device like a mouse or a trackpad. We can probably assume that the user has a broadband connection.

When we say someone is on mobile, all we know is they’re using a device that is…not a desktop. We know very little about what they see and how they interact. They might have a tiny 240×320 BlackBerry Bold screen, or a glorious iPad 2048×1536 Retina display, large enough to rival even a desktop monitor. Their pointing device might be as direct as touching the screen with their fat, greasy fingers, or as abstract as navigating with a four-way rocker. They might have a connection that’s no better than a 56K modem, or a connection that’s as zippy as a full-fledged workstation with a dedicated T3 connection. All we know is that we can’t really count on anything.

Daunting, right? How are we supposed to make good design decisions if we don’t know the boundaries of what the user will see? How do we structure information, if we don’t know how the user will navigate and make selections? Most important, how do we know what content someone’s going to want, when we don’t know anything about their context?

It seems that many businesses are choosing to answer these questions by hiding their heads in the sand. “No one will ever want to do that on mobile,” they insist. “Only a fraction of our visits today come from mobile devices,” they sigh. “Users need only location-based services on mobile,” they say, stubbornly.

If there’s one thing we should have learned from the web, it’s that user behavior evolves more quickly than businesses realize. User expectations evolve and move forward, and only later do organizations hurry to catch up. If you’re wondering if you’re going to need to invest in getting your content on mobile, quit hoping you won’t have to. Your customers are already there.

What you’ll get from this book

This book discusses why and how to get your content onto many different devices, platforms, screen sizes, and resolutions. Content includes your text, images, videos, charts, and any other forms of information your reader might want from you.

While the smartphone isn’t the sole focus of this book, many of the examples will focus on smartphones because they are both the most common device and most challenging form factor. Getting content onto mobile phones is top of mind for many organizations.

If you’re stuck on whether and why to be on mobile, this book can help you make the case. You’ll get data and statistics about how people use their phones today, including insight into emerging audiences like the “mobile-mostly” user. You’ll also get analysis and rationale about why it’s important to get all your content onto mobile—not just a subset that you decided was appropriate for the “mobile context.”

If you want to know how to get your content (especially desktop web content) ready for multi-channel publishing (especially onto mobile devices) this book will help you get there. You’ll learn about adaptive content and how this approach to structured content will help you publish flexibly to multiple channels. By creating presentation-independent content that includes meaningful metadata, you’ll set yourself up for a future where your content can go anywhere.

You’ll learn how to evaluate whether your current desktop content will work on mobile—and how to edit it down to provide a better reading experience for both desktop and mobile users. A content inventory and content audit will help you evaluate whether you should revise, delete, or keep your content as-is. You’ll also figure out if you need to create new content by conducting a gap analysis.

Want to know how to structure your content so users can easily read and navigate it on a mobile device? You’ve come to the right place. While navigation models and screen layouts might differ for mobile, you can develop an underlying information architecture that will give you the flexibility you need.

You’ll also learn how your internal processes need to change—your editorial workflow, content management tools, and organizational structure—to support great content on mobile. Managing people and process gets more complex when you’re dealing with multi-channel publishing, and this book will help you make sure you can maintain your content over time.

What you won’t get from this book

There are many topics, even some closely related to the themes discussed in this book, that I simply can’t cover in one slender volume. Fortunately these topics have been discussed at length by other people:

• This book is geared toward organizations with dozens, hundreds, thousands, even millions of pages of content on a desktop website, most likely published out of a content management system, that now need to be published to new devices and platforms. If you build transactional applications—like web apps that enable people to manage their finances or personal health, or social applications focused on user-generated content—this book is not going to discuss how to adapt your application interface and interaction design for mobile.
• This book will not tell you whether you should develop a mobile website or a native application. There are good reasons for each approach, and others have covered this debate at length. This book will help you get your content into shape so that you can publish it to the mobile web, native apps, and anywhere and everywhere else you might want it to go. As a result, I’ll often discuss mobile web and mobile apps interchangeably. I know they’re not the same from a development and interaction perspective, but from a content perspective, your goal should be to make it possible to publish to any or all of them.
• This book will not recommend whether you should use responsive web design or develop separate templates to cover different form factors. Again, there are lots of reasons, pro and con, for choosing one approach over another, and the decision depends on your unique situation. Because your content management infrastructure does influence which approach you choose, I’ll touch briefly on this topic in this book. However, no preference should be taken for one approach over the other. Only you can decide what works for your content and your organization.
• I’m also not going to tell you which content management system is the “best” one. There are many, many factors that go into a decision of that magnitude. There’s no best CMS, only the CMS that’s best for you. If you’re considering implementing a new CMS to help you manage multi-channel publishing more easily, I will offer some general guidance about what to consider—but I won’t recommend a particular platform.

Let’s kick this off by looking at why you need to get your content on mobile.