“Beyond code, beyond visuals and interactions, what do all these apps have in common with each other? Text”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
I\u2019ve installed a lot more than that on my phone: 161 apps at last count. I use apps for everything from movies and music to weather and maps. Lots of social stuff, banking, travel, local services, fitness, cooking, more than a few games, even apps made by governments. And beyond code, beyond visuals and interactions, what do they all have in common with each other?<\/p>\n
Text. Every app contains at least some text. Text makes up interface controls, labels for navigation, prompts for search, and more. 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. Overall, text does a lot of heavy lifting when it comes to helping us get value out of apps \u2013 you\u2019d have a hard time using them if the text wasn\u2019t there.<\/p>\n
So if text is so fundamental to our experiences with apps, why are we relatively blind to its role in interface design? If it\u2019s one of the most common elements in our designs, why is it so often the last thing most teams focus on \u2013 if they focus on it at all?<\/p>\n
My hypothesis is that text is so common that we\u2019ve forgotten everything it does for us.<\/p>\n
Measuring the letters<\/h2>\n
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. 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).<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s what this process looked like for the Apple Music app:<\/p>\n
But beyond how much text an app uses, I also wanted to know something more important: what\u2019s the right amount of text to show?<\/p>\n It turns out that 36% of the average iOS app\u2019s starting screen is used to show text. That ranges from just 3.5% for Snapchat to 57.5% for Ticketmaster, with a lot of apps clustered between 30% and 40%. Outliers at the top end include Google Maps (44%), Paypal (47%), and Uber (50.5%.)<\/p>\n See the full study and results<\/a> for all 25 apps.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n Looking across all of these apps, the amount of screen space used to display text is remarkably similar. Throwing out any number of the highest and lowest values barely shifts the average. As you can see in this chart, over half of the apps I studied used between 30-40% of their screen area for text:<\/p>\n Not all apps are created equal or serve the same purpose. So the amount of text they display varies greatly by their use case \u2013 the job they\u2019re intended to do for the people who use them.<\/p>\n For 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. 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. 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.<\/p>\n “Social media apps reserve most of their interfaces to share personal video or images instead of text”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n On the other hand, social media apps \u2013 especially Snapchat (3.5%), TikTok (16.5%), and Instagram (20%) \u2013 reserve most of their interfaces to share personal video or images instead of text. Even when that media includes text, it generally plays a secondary role in the experience, such as navigation or context. Activity tracking apps such as Fitbit (29.5%) and Strava (41%) tend to use more of their screens to show visualizations of activity data rather than representing that data in text or language.<\/p>\n Here are the average results for each set of apps by use case (some are shown multiple times because they serve more than one use case):<\/p>\n I went into this study assuming that there isn\u2019t a one-size-fits-all answer to the question of the right or best amount of text to use in an app screen \u2013 it\u2019s always going to be contextual to the services an app provides (and to whom it provides them and how).<\/p>\n But to check that assumption, I plotted the amount of space used for text in the apps I studied against their App Annie download rankings<\/a> to see if there\u2019s any correlation with popularity and widespread use.<\/p>\n There\u2019s no relationship here at all. Similarly, plotting the amount of text shown in an app versus its app store ratings also revealed a very weak relationship:<\/p>\n Even if there were strong relationships between these factors, we know that correlation isn\u2019t causation. Overall, my biggest finding is that there\u2019s a cluster of 11 very popular apps with high ratings that happen to use between 30-40% of their screen space to show text.<\/p>\n “My theory is that app developers shouldn\u2019t use less than 30% or more than 40% of their first screen for text”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n I\u2019d need to study many more apps to prove this out, but my theory is that app developers shouldn\u2019t use less than 30% or more than 40% of their first screen for text unless they\u2019re narrowly focused on a specific use case, such as social images\/video on the low end or news\/finance on the high end.<\/p>\n Any company building a new app that uses something other than 30-40% of the screen space for text should weigh that decision carefully and validate it with research and testing. Otherwise, they\u2019re flying in the face of a clear trend present in popular apps across the globe in many common use cases.<\/p>\n So how can you work from these results to make the best decisions about the text you show in your app?<\/p>\n You\u2019ve probably noticed that Snapchat is the clear outlier out of all the apps I studied, using only 3.5% of its first screen to show text:<\/p>\n This minimal use of text bears more scrutiny, especially as the next closest app I studied was TikTok, which uses a relatively gargantuan 16.5% of its first screen to show text. This begs the question: how should an app developer make decisions about the amount of text to show and its quality?<\/p>\n At Intercom, we work from principles to make these decisions<\/a> so that we can avoid known failures, repeat our successes, and stay aligned as we move fast with our products. For example, we have a content design principle of \u201cStrive for less,\u201d which means that when we have two competing options that are otherwise equally good, we\u2019ll choose the one that uses less text.<\/p>\n “Snapchat opens with the camera view so users can create their snaps as quickly as possible. Seeing other people\u2019s snaps is secondary to the act of creating your own”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Snapchat may follow a similar principle, but they don\u2019t need to show much text because they\u2019re not just building just a camera-first app, but also a creator-first app. Snapchat opens with the camera view so users can create their snaps as quickly as possible. Seeing other people\u2019s snaps is secondary to the act of creating your own.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, on the far end of the scale, Ticketmaster had the highest amount of text, using 57.5% of their first screen. This isn\u2019t just due to the retail focus on the app, but specifically to Ticketmaster\u2019s use of poster-like images featuring large text to sell tickets for events. They use even more space to show text than Medium (51.5%), which is an app focused on reading!<\/p>\n Another of Intercom\u2019s content design principles comes from Simon Sinek<\/a>: \u201cStart with why.\u201d This principle reminds us that the value we provide people (and our motivations for providing it) should come first before a detailed explanation of instructions.<\/p>\n We might see this principle at work in eBay\u2019s app, where the first text used for messaging (instead of search or navigation) is a large, high-contrast banner reassuring people they can sell their items safely and get 100 free listings per month.<\/p>\n I imagine this addresses two concerns eBay have found in research: sellers hesitate to list items due to: 1) a lack of trust in buyers; and 2) the cost of creating a listing. These factors could make this banner the most valuable message for new users (and therefore for eBay) when they open the app.<\/p>\n Intercom\u2019s final content design principle is inspired by Steve Krug<\/a>: \u201cDon\u2019t make me think!\u201d This means we try to remove as much ambiguity as we can, being clear, not clever<\/a>. We use plain English in order to be concrete and specific. And we always emphasize the most important thing someone needs to see right away.<\/p>\n You can see a great example of this in Netflix\u2019s app, where the primary focus is on a series named Derry Girls<\/em>. This series title is the first message Netflix shows apart from navigation \u2013 and it\u2019s shown in huge, all-caps text that uses 8% of the entire screen. For comparison, consider that all of Snapchat\u2019s UI text only takes up just 3.5% of the screen. I imagine Netflix intends for these giant-sized words to grab my attention, and rightly so: I love the show and when I took this screen capture, a new season had recently became available.<\/p>\n So 36% of an app\u2019s first screen is (checks calculator)\u2026 just over one-third of the total space.<\/p>\n That\u2019s a significant amount, especially given that mobile apps are very small spaces. Anything taking up a third of the screen has to be valuable enough to pull its weight. If the text we see in our apps weren\u2019t communicating something valuable, then it wouldn\u2019t be there.<\/p>\n But text is more than just a means of communicating messages \u2013 it also serves as the interface itself. If you remove the interface text from mobile apps, they turn out to be empty, confusing experiences. Mig Reyes<\/a> did this experiment with desktop websites 6 years ago and the lesson he shared then still holds true for mobile apps today: \u201cDesign is still about the words.<\/a>\u201d<\/p>\n Without text in the UI, most apps become far less valuable… or completely unusable! The sole exception seems to be camera-first apps like Snapchat and TikTok, which only have a small amount of interface text in their first screens. But \u201ccamera-first\u201d doesn\u2019t mean \u201ccamera-only\u201d \u2013 both of these apps also have deeper screens (such as profiles, friend lists, settings, and more) that are very text-heavy. Even when there\u2019s not much text at the surface, it still dominates the system as a whole.<\/p>\n “Making the language useful, usable, and functional takes effort. It\u2019s not something to leave until the end”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n So while most app design teams focus a lot of their time on things like Gestalt principles, iconography, color palettes, typography, and \u201cdelight,\u201d they should keep in mind that language is design material<\/a>, too. It\u2019s the infrastructure guiding people<\/a> in your app \u2013 and not just in informative moments like onboarding or error states, but throughout the entire user journey. Making the language useful, usable, and functional takes effort. It\u2019s not something to leave until the end \u2013 or even after the end, which is still an all-too-common problem<\/a>.<\/p>\n To build meaningful experiences, product teams should focus on the words just as much, if not more, as any other part of their apps. After all, language isn\u2019t a distraction from the experience.<\/p>\n It is the experience.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" How important is text in your mobile app interface? We studied the first screen of 25 popular iOS apps across several use cases to determine how much text they use.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":403,"featured_media":22840,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"category":[5],"tags":[20682,10721],"coauthors":[16636],"class_list":["post-22838","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-product-and-design","tag-app-design","tag-content-design"],"yoast_head":"\n![](\"https:\/\/www.intercom.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/01\/App-text-iTunes.jpg\")
\nAbout 36% of the first screen of Apple Music\u2019s iOS app contains text. And yes, that is an NKOTB album.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\nCalculating the results<\/h2>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.intercom.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/01\/App-text-grid.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.intercom.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/01\/App-text-chart1.png\")
<\/p>\nText shown by app use case<\/h2>\n
\n
What\u2019s the right amount of text to show?<\/h2>\n
![](\"https:\/\/www.intercom.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/01\/App-text-Chart-App-Annie.png\")
<\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.intercom.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/01\/App-text-App-Store.png\")
<\/p>\nThe write stuff<\/h2>\n
![](\"https:\/\/www.intercom.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/01\/App-text-Snapchat.jpg\")
\nAbout 3.5% of the first screen of Snapchat\u2019s iOS app contains text. Also, my dog is 100% adorable.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.intercom.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/01\/App-text-Ticketmaster.jpg\")
\nAbout 57.5% of the first screen of Ticketmaster\u2019s iOS app contains text. Mamma mia, indeed!<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.intercom.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/01\/App-text-Ebay.jpg\")
\nAbout 33% of the first screen of eBay\u2019s iOS app contains text, but they put the most important thing first.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.intercom.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/01\/App-text-Netflix.jpg\")
\nAbout 38.5% of the first screen of Netflix\u2019s iOS app contains text. Derry Girls is how I\u2019m learning Irish slang.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\nApp design is still about the words<\/h2>\n
![](\"https:\/\/www.intercom.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/01\/App-text-Paypal.jpg\")
\nHere\u2019s the Revolut app shown with and without interface text. Could you have a meaningful, valuable experience with an app like this?<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n