Content Design for the Digital Reader

I was sitting on the bus on the way to work a few mornings ago when a thought suddenly struck me: “Where’s all the trash?”

Washington, D.C., where I live, is a city known for its appetite for reading. On any given morning, the downtown line is a gray hue of policy wonks, academics, financiers and other pseudo-intellectual types. Imagine a bad dream, where everyone around you is sitting cross-legged, wearing the same suit, flipping through pages of The Economist. Or The Wall Street Journal. Or The Washington Post.

I’ve taken the same line every morning now for two years. And the only surer bet than what people will be reading when I step on the bus is what they’ll undoubtedly leave behind: wads of crumpled newsprint and discarded magazines (the city that reads together, apparently doesn’t also pick up after one another).

But the bus on this morning, and on most mornings recently, seemed as clean as a city bus could seem clean. How? Did all these people suddenly stop reading? Had all the talk about a greener planet finally gone to peoples’ heads? Were the masses suddenly compelled to, heaven forbid, clean up after themselves?

Maybe.  Or—and here’s when it hit me—could the masses have gone digital? Goodbye newsprint. Hello Kindle. Hello iPad. Good morning, Smartphone. Take a look around. Mass public transit is the single-best proving ground on the planet for the digital revolution.

Self-professed content nerd that I am, I hopped off the bus that morning thinking about you, The Reader. It’s no secret that technology is changing how we interact with content. But how, I wondered, is technology changing the more intimate experience of reading?

To find out more, I dialed up Terry Pittman. A content marketing executive with more than two decades of experience who’s helped develop online reading applications for publishers such and AOL and Hearst, Pittman is also the voice behind the blog, “From Concept 2 Market: What Makes a Product Worth Talking About.”

You’ve been in the content space for a long time—20 years. Things have changed.

Absolutely. There was not a ton of reading that went on in the early days on computers. It really wasn’t until the mid nineties that the web really began to feature mainstream articles and reading. Today it’s a dramatically different world where it is actually possible to read on a screen for a long time. The screen resolution is really good. Laptops and tablets make it possible to read in bed or in a park, or anywhere you want.

You can read magazines and books—you know, the paper kind —in bed or in parks, too. Is print in trouble?

There is inertia behind things that just makes the intersection inevitable. In this case, I think that the cost of and the efficiency of delivery and, even more important, the ability to get content to people, to a broader audience, to an audience that can share amongst themselves is what’s driving the movement toward digital reading.

How is the digital reading experience different than reading on paper? Is it (gulp) better?

Something happened when the iPhone and iPod Touch came out. People started seeing that you can navigate with your fingers. There’s this sort of gestural language that readers now have, where if the thing they are reading on looks like it should be possible to zoom in on a picture or look at a chart more carefully or interact with a chart, or if they read a word they don’t really know, that they should be able to tap on it and have an option of seeing where else the word appeared in the article or pop up the Wikipedia entry on that word. That’s helpful. And that’s the kind of thing I think really makes digital reading a great experience and better than paper.

My mom has a Kindle. She loves it. But these “devices” have a lot of bells and whistles. Is there such a thing as too functional?

It’s about knowing your audience. The worst thing that a publisher can do is dress up a publication with lots of functionality that gets in the way of reading.

No need to throw the kitchen sink at them.

Reading is more intimate. People know how paper behaves. That’s why the digital device, whatever it may be, and the content on it, needs to be polite and needs to respond to the reader as opposed to us as developers, designers, content creators, whoever, thinking that because we found some cool new technology that we are going to wow our audience by slipping it in or putting it in front of them so that they can’t get away from it.

So if a reader struggles with a device, it’s possible they could blame the content? That’s a scary thought.

From the reader’s point of view, the content and the device do merge into one. Though the reader knows that the device is the device and that the content is the content, the expectation that they work well together and appear to be thoughtfully integrated is definitely there.

Otherwise, it’s not helpful.

It’s not. And you can’t grow circulation if the experience is not great. The wonderful thing about digital media is it’s very sharable. You want people talking about what you’re writing and creating. You want them sharing it with other people, because that’s how you get new customers. If not, they are going to go somewhere else.

As we look at how to better the reader experience, where are we headed? Can we truly surround our readers with content?

I’m going to take it that “surround” means the reader isn’t feeling claustrophobic, but rather that the content is available and accessible conveniently wherever they are by means that are useful and easy for them to access in the instant that they want it. I think it’s going to be a real challenge for publishers and content developers to do that exceptionally well. But it has to happen. Because that’s the path we’re on.