Even when that media includes text, it generally plays a secondary role in the experience, such as navigation or context. On the other hand, social media apps – especially Snapchat (3.5%), TikTok (16.5%), and Instagram (20%) – reserve most of their interfaces to share personal video or images instead of text. “Social media apps reserve most of their interfaces to share personal video or images instead of text” Apps that focus on maps, such as Google Maps (44%), Strava (41%), and Uber (50.5%) show the most text because of all of the metadata appearing as labels, which help people orient themselves. Similarly, apps focused on retail, such as Amazon (31.5%) and eBay (33%), and services, such as Deliveroo (33.5%) and Uber (50.5%) often need to show more text in order to provide immediate value to their audiences. So the amount of text they display varies greatly by their use case – the job they’re intended to do for the people who use them.įor example, personal finance apps like PayPal (47%) and Revolut (35%) use a lot of text in their starting screens to display information about accounts, recent transactions, and activity. Not all apps are created equal or serve the same purpose. As you can see in this chart, over half of the apps I studied used between 30-40% of their screen area for text: Throwing out any number of the highest and lowest values barely shifts the average. Looking across all of these apps, the amount of screen space used to display text is remarkably similar. See the full study and results for all 25 apps. Outliers at the top end include Google Maps (44%), Paypal (47%), and Uber (50.5%.) That ranges from just 3.5% for Snapchat to 57.5% for Ticketmaster, with a lot of apps clustered between 30% and 40%. It turns out that 36% of the average iOS app’s starting screen is used to show text. And yes, that is an NKOTB album.īut beyond how much text an app uses, I also wanted to know something more important: what’s the right amount of text to show? Calculating the results Here’s what this process looked like for the Apple Music app:Ībout 36% of the first screen of Apple Music’s iOS app contains text. I examined the first screen that loaded in 25 popular iOS apps across a variety of use cases (such as social media, retail, services, personal finance, and more). I created a method for determining how much space an app uses to show text, using a grid of 200 cells and counting how many cells contain any letters, numbers, words, or other bits of language. My hypothesis is that text is so common that we’ve forgotten everything it does for us. So if text is so fundamental to our experiences with apps, why are we relatively blind to its role in interface design? If it’s one of the most common elements in our designs, why is it so often the last thing most teams focus on – if they focus on it at all? Overall, text does a lot of heavy lifting when it comes to helping us get value out of apps – you’d have a hard time using them if the text wasn’t there. Text introduces us to each app, starting with its name, and text guides us to how apps work and what value they provide, from instructions and inputs to settings and disclaimers. Text makes up interface controls, labels for navigation, prompts for search, and more. And beyond code, beyond visuals and interactions, what do they all have in common with each other? Lots of social stuff, banking, travel, local services, fitness, cooking, more than a few games, even apps made by governments. I use apps for everything from movies and music to weather and maps. I’ve installed a lot more than that on my phone: 161 apps at last count. “Beyond code, beyond visuals and interactions, what do all these apps have in common with each other? Text” A quick Google search and a calculator tells me that’s an average 25 mobile apps for every person on Earth. People downloaded a record 204 billion of them from the Google and Apple app stores in 2019. Mobile apps dominate our digital experiences. The results shows us the value of taking a principled approach to writing text for mobile apps – because product design is still all about the words. I studied the first screen of 25 popular iOS apps to determine how much text they use.
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