The problem with comScore’s data in that analysis is that they don’t have stats for how many of the sites that appear in their figures have content that actually works on smaller screens / different devices.

If the content doesn’t work and or is not usable on smaller screens the you are probably going to get less page views as people bail out due to bad experience and lack of need to be there :)

In terms of one of our sites which does work on a good chunk of devices, we see that average pages per visit numbers don’t drop off significantly (there is about 1.1 pages / visit in it, with about 25% of our overall traffic coming from non desktop sources) .

We have some done some initial analysis of scrolling behaviour and timing on our main content pages (a rough attempt to measure reading as opposed to scrolling down quickly) and have found that on average 77% of iOS & Android users who view a page get all the way to the bottom of the content (this figure of course lumps all the devices running those OSs together at this point). We haven’t broken our data down as far as devices yet as we’re still collecting it.

Thanks James. I think you’re spot on. Most of the sites that people use won’t be optimised for smaller screens – which is why I’m keen to gather data from this site (and I’m grateful for you sharing data from yours).

I think that users experience ‘friction’ depending on their context, the device and the website. It’s not always the device that’s to blame for the friction. As web designers, our job is to figure out how to minimise friction in the bit that we control – the web site.

Interesting information. I worked on a text-heavy site once where content could be gracefully degraded for different media. Essentially, sub-editors would tag sections of copy to indicate priorities within it, making some parts of it optional if the system could not display the whole thing.

Technically, it worked pretty well, but in practice the sub-editors didn’t really care (or perhaps couldn’t do it because couldn’t tell what it would look like) so it fell flat in the end. Was an interesting exercise in trying to do responsive design properly though.

As an aside, Giles’s post demonstrates another reason why responsive design is a lot harder than just implementing some trendy CSS.

@Jonathan – Thanks. Yes, most of what I see about responsive web is about design, not maintenance. If sites are easy to maintain, the owners can focus on delivering great content.

Ah, now this is such a relevant topic in today’s marketplace where desktop usage is slowing and mobile usage is exploding. The question of responsive text vs. truncated text came up at UX Stack Exchange (http://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/18005/responsive-text-or-truncated-text-in-mobile-devices).

Truncated text is typically not a content strategy for several reasons. On both desktop and mobile, you have to engage the user in order get them to read more. But, on mobile you have to engage the user more quickly, and this comes at the cost of overviewing the content to sufficient enough extent that user can identify *parts* of the content that are of interest.

This then requires a whole different strategy when designing for multiple devices in that the structure of the content needs to be analysed and organized not just in context of the rest of the content but in context of its whole journey from copywriter to reader. Combine this with the differing user behaviour constraints that mobile provides, and it becomes next to impossible to actually provide the *same* content for all devices because it’s much more complex than simply making the teaser/intro shorter.

Karen McGrane writes in her answer to the question linked above, that truncation can be a strategy but only if you can be confident that the first sentence provides enough context and value to inform the user.

As Karen essentially goes on to say, the implication is that if truncation is not actually the correct strategy, then comes the question of whether the CMS can even support the provision of content for multiple devices; the different fields and metadata that are required; the supplying of ‘progressively enhanced’ text (vs. the download of all content to all devices).

Not only does the CMS need to support this alternative content strategy, but the copywriters themselves need to understand the varied audience and devices on which content may be served in order to specify how the content is to be shortened; chunked; selectively delivered; or in some case completely rewritten to remove the ‘fluff’. Thus the copywriter is distracted from the job they are meant to be doing.

The problem I see however, is that since it’s rare that one single person is responsible for the actual content, the ability to actually manage and organize: the content from different sources; content by different people; content about a multitude of topics; and content incorporating a variety of different media is beyond most organisations. It simply won’t happen in any but the smallest or most dedicated org where a content curator can manage the process, in which case the additional obfuscation of an extra layer between content creator and content delivery is going to cause complications, become expensive and prone to antagonism from copywriters who see their content effectively censored for different devices via a process in which they have little control.

I’d love to be proved wrong but I suspect the cost/benefit ratio will be so low that in 99% of cases we will simply continue to see truncated content rather than curated content. The upside though, is that as I started of mentioning, mobile is exploding, the ‘Mobile First’ approach is gathering support, and that gradually the question will perhaps not just become ‘how do we make desktop-targeted content suitable for mobile?’ but also ‘how do we ensure that mobile-targeted content is also suitable for desktop?’

I am viewing this article on a mobile phone. That doesn’t mean I am going to read less information or scan the page. If anything I am more focused than on my desktop because I am focusing on a single activity & this site renders really well (with nothing to distract me) on a mobile device.

It does however take an age to write this comment so I will sign off now. Good article but I don’t buy into mobile dwell time being lower than desktop or any less focused; its just more difficult to engage on a mobile device.