Writing and Design for Mobile

As I mentioned in a previous post, when you’re designing a mobile site you must pare down your information to the essentials.

Jacob Nielsen has a good post today on this topic, Defer Secondary Content When Writing for Mobile Users. Some key points:

• Put only the top-level points on the page, with links to get the details.
• Avoid use of stock photos and other elements that take space but don’t really communicate anything.
• Avoid block of text, and use bullet lists when possible.

The second point is one that many designers (and our own site) will struggle with, but I agree with the intent.

The Nielsen/Norman group is offering a series of related seminars at its Usability Week conference, being held this week in New York, Sept. 25-30 in San Francisco, October 3-7 in Austin, and Nov. 13-18 in London.

Ironically, the readability of the Usability Week conference site is poor on a large monitor, because it is a fluid design without any maximum width, resulting in excessively long lines of text. Try adding a max-width!