MATT MEUSE
The Gateway (University of Alberta)

EDMONTON (CUP) — Reading comprehension from a smartphone screen is as low as half of that when reading from a standard desktop monitor, according to a recent study by a University of Alberta research team.

James Miller, professor of electrical and computer engineering and a member of the team that conducted the study, said that quirks inherent to smartphones and how people read from them means that mobile content providers need to develop smartphone-specific versions of their material if they want to have it properly understood by users.

“People tend to read better on [paper] than on [desktop computers], and when you just drop down again [to smartphones], you’re making much more visual demands,” Miller said.

The study focused specifically on reading privacy policies used by websites such as Facebook and Google. Using a Cloze test — a standard test of comprehension that omits words from a document at regular intervals and asks subjects to insert the correct word — Miller and his team found that comprehension of a privacy policy when read on an iPhone-sized screen was rated at 48 per cent compared to the same policy read on a desktop monitor.

Privacy policies are often problematic in their construction to begin with. Jakob Nielsen, a researcher in web usability, says that as of March 2011, Facebook’s privacy policy is rated at a 13th grade reading level. This means that people with less than a year of university experience already find it difficult to understand without the added challenges inherent in reading on a screen.

“As far we can tell, privacy policies are, as a protection mechanism for people who are using the Internet on smartphones … basically completely useless. They are completely unreadable,” Miller said. “In reality, the user will be getting no real information when they enter details. They will have no idea what’s really going to happen to them.”

These results, combined with the rapid increase in popularity of smartphones, suggested to Miller and his team that a complete revolution in writing styles is needed to balance deficits in understanding.

However, this is a slow process. According to Miller, we are only just starting to see the emergence of a unique online writing style that is recognizably different from writing for print.

“All of the international newspapers are [online] now, but if you look at many sites on the Internet, people are still just copying paper,” he said. “That’s not going to work on a web browser, and it’s certainly not going to work on a smartphone.”

What this new style would look like is not entirely clear, but it is something that Miller and his team hope to discover through further research.

“What we’ve been doing recently is trying to characterize what the differences are between the text that you see on your printed version of a newspaper and the text that you would see on a version of a newspaper viewed in a browser,” he said.

“We’re trying to look at and characterize how the writing style in the newspaper changes between the two media, and whether there is then some way to extrapolate further down onto smaller devices or whether in reality it needs a complete shift in thought to accommodate them.”

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image: Celiemme/Flickr