Now that I have an app for my hotel, what should I put on it? How much information do I need to present? Will my guest pay attention?
If you have found yourself asking these questions, read further. Our top performing clients not only believe content matters, but also the way you present it. We support their thinking: content is key to engage with your guests. For your convenience, we have put together a best practice for your content entry.
You may be a luxury resort, a busy meeting hub mainly focused on business clients, a casual retreat where guests come in while waiting for the next exciting excursion.
Before you start developing pages, it is important to understand your users. Craft content that is applicable to their needs, as well, make it predictive of their wants.
On a general level, two behaviors stand out when we interact with mobile applications.
Your Brand identity defines both you and your guest experience.
Create a voice that aligns with your Brand standard as well as with the genuine culture of your own property. The support guides will provide you with further guidelines that will help prevent your copy from missing the target.
3) Keep it Short...
By their nature, mobile apps restrict your creative freedom. You have a limited amount of space to convey your message. Users want to quickly find information or perform an action rather than scrolling through endless amounts of unnecessary content. Also, keep in mind viewers look primarily at the center of their device screen as indicated in this eye-tracking study from Briggsby.
Concise writing takes time and hard work. It is really worth you ask yourself two questions when you go create custom content or want to update existing one.
Example:
See the difference.
The first answer is accurate but vague. It could be about almost anything content-related.
The second answer provides the writer with a clear understanding of what one is trying to communicate to its audience.
Having a focus is essential when producing quality copy. It's good practice to answer the second question several times; a more focused answer will help you develop text that is targeted and impactful for the reader.
For mobile content, concise writing is essential. In this case, the necessity has more to do with the screen size than the user’s attention span. Your goal is to present the user with as much information as possible without requiring the user to swipe or tap, wipe your page clean of anything that’s unnecessary.
Write short descriptions as readers tend to get lost in long walls of text.
Nowhere is this truer than on mobile devices. By dividing your text in short paragraphs you will give rhythm to your information and you will consistently dictate the way readers scroll through information.
Make good use of bullet points. Bullet points help users maximize their cost/benefit ratio. That is, people want more thrills and less interaction overhead. Do you want to shortlist your Spa treatments? List them.
Runtriz offers you a variety of formatting options to help you customize and make your content hit its audience. Click on ‘Formatting Help’ while on your Content Management System and get started. (find a better way to present where to find our tooltip).
Spelling and grammatical errors are not pretty. Get someone else in your team to QA your content, mistakes happen!
Remember, your app will be primarily displayed on mobile devices. Use your App Preview Generator to put your app and contentat a test. Your Preview Generator is a mobile device emulator, this means you are going to review and read your pages as your guests do.