Less is More (Chapter 7 Post)

            I’m going to try to not sound like a broken record from my last post, but the topics are pretty similar. Chapter 7 in the Qualman book discusses how Twitter and other social media platforms have condensed and shortened the expectations of information in the media, since Twitter limits posts to 140 characters. The chapter goes on to discuss how different companies are trying to adhere to these new rules.

            I’ve learned in my studies as a Digital Communications major that certain media, like videos, need to be short and concise in order to keep users’ attention. If the video runs too long (or the blog post or the article or whatever it may be), then the audience will lose interest and not view the rest of it. It is partly for this reason that Twitter is so successful: it’s condensed and concise. This is also very important in the mobile world.

            Companies need to design for mobile devices because that is the future of the industry. In an article I found on Mashable, it states that people use Twitter on their smartphones more than 10 times more than they do on desktop computers. Facebook’s number of mobile users is not nearly as impressive. That is because it feels like Twitter was made for mobile usage. It’s just natural to scroll through tweets on my phone. I often find that I check Twitter on my phone much more than I check it on my computer.

            Facebook, on the other hand, feels like a chore when I am on the app. I have often heard complaints about the Facebook app, and I have to agree with them. Besides the technical problems, the interface of Facebook simply does not have the same flow that Twitter’s does. This goes to show how Twitter is paving the way for how mobile apps should be designed.