Mobile Habits Today: The Age of Convenience
If there is one thing that’s true about mobile devices, it’s that pretty much everyone has them.
In today’s day and age, it would be considered rare to see a ten-year-old without some form of phone. In fact, according to the Pew Research Center, 97% of Americans own a cell phone.
Looking only at the United States, it’s clear that media consumption is extremely high. Especially media consumption via mobile channels. Some consider the COVID-19 Pandemic to be an essential factor as to why these consumer habits shifted from desktop to mobile. The main reasons are simply entertainment and convenience.
As Insider Intelligence states, U.S. media consumption on mobile has displaced traditional viewership of alternative mediums that were once popular, such as television and desktop. Today, consumers get most of their entertainment on mobile platforms, especially due to the rise of social media over the past 20 years. Although the human need for entertainment is not necessarily a new concept, getting that entertainment exclusively through mobile apps and interfaces is on the rise.
Overall, mobile has greater access to content which is illustrated by consumers spending more time on specific apps than browsers. However, mobile browsers are still necessary for certain online activities, such as shopping.
Apps and browsers do not boast such distinct differences as they may seem. And web apps have the ability to not fall too far behind, as long as they keep up an app-like appearance.
Thinking Conveniently…
On average, the expected engaged reading time of media on mobile is one minute and three seconds (Mediator). Therefore, mobile developers need to keep their content very concise, so as to not lose any attention within that minute and three-second window. According to Patrick Stox from Search Engine Land, the content on mobile needs to be three things: navigable, skimmable, and digestible. If the mobile content follows these three “rules,” it will be seen as more user-friendly and continue to have a high rate of traffic coming to and from the mobile platform.
When you think of convenience, the word ease probably comes to mind. Convenience is often related to getting exactly what you want, exactly when you want it. Author Nathalie Nahai refers to humans as “fundamentally hard-wired to seek out personal satisfaction and gratification” (p. 74). This statement about humans furthers the idea that mobile users do not want a cut back in content, but they want ease in being able to find the specific content they are searching for. In fact, many users simply get frustrated and leave mobile sites or applications if it takes more than a few tries to find what they’re looking for.
Due to this need of mobile users finding the desired information immediately, there are multiple features to mobile applications that users are quite fond of. Although I previously stated that mobile users do not spend much time reading, they do enjoy a table of contents to make finding certain platforms easy. Often, many are content with finding the specific content under a broad heading, which makes sense of the consistent use of expandable content. This can be seen quite often under FAQ sections on mobile platforms, where users can click on a question that may slightly describe their dilemma and be met with more ideas and solutions in the expandable content.
While mobile users are quite sure of what they want (immediate gratification) they can also be quite sure of what they don’t want, which leads to the rise of filters on many different mobile interfaces. Filters are a quick and easy way to pick out what users are looking for while eliminating everything that does not match their needs or wants, similar to a good old game of Guess Who.
Web versus Mobile
Mobile users are not the only ones that access online content, so it’s important to create content that works for both platforms in order to maintain an engaged audience across the board. Such as me, writing this, checking on how it looks on mobile versus how it looks on web. Making these adjustments based on the varying platforms works well to meet the mobile habits of convenience. See below to see how this particular site could be adapted to each platform!
