In paragraphs of text on mobile, should we make use of ellipsis with a link, such as "read more” altogether, or keep them separated? What is best in terms of UX?
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I didn't understand your question exactly, do you mean presenting hyperlink image to be displayed with the text or not? or meaning sth absolutely different?– Erhan YaşarDec 13, 2019 at 11:51
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What initially I wanted to confirm was if an ellipsis by itself is understood by the user as "more content is hidden" and what would be better on mobile. Just ellipsis or a call to action such as "read more", or both, or something else.– Estela GasparDec 27, 2019 at 16:09
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Are you going for the kind of mechanism that many media outlets use on mobile web these days? I.e. where top paragraph or so of article is visible but the rest is covered by the footer, a fade, and a 'read more' button? What is the nature of the content?– strayaFeb 4, 2020 at 5:53
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3 Answers
The key objective here (of any blog or article) is to have the reader open the article. BUT, a person who opened a blog would be more likely to actually open and read an article regardless of visual cues. So instead it's essential to make the whole section, including the title, excerpt, tags and maybe a picture, as a link(s). That way it's easier to click any part of it and expect the article to open.
This answer gives a better outlook on the whether to use a "read more" text or not.
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Would be the all section be clickable then? Wouldn't that be not very good in SEO terms? Dec 27, 2019 at 16:12
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@EstelaG Yes, the entire section will now be clickable as well as any other links nested under it too. So if you have links for tags or categories or even an author bio, all of them have their own links working separately as long as you are HTML5 compliant (all browsers are, anyhow). Specifically, have a look at this question. This might clear up a few things. Dec 28, 2019 at 8:40
You'll need to consider where the read more material appears. If it is a link then you are going to a new page, or using an Ajax call to refresh the page to expand and show more content. Another convention is using accordion "+" plus signs and often tabs to indicate content can open up and drop down. You may want to look at the conventions used by WordPress to get a feel for standard practice...*read more https://codex.wordpress.org/Customizing_the_Read_More *.
Given this question has the tags mobile and hyperlinks but not the tag web, I assume you are designing a mobile application. If you are implementing hyperlinks to navigate, you are effectively making a website on mobile, that is not a great approach.
An ellipsis on mobile indicates truncated text, that is all.
It sounds like you are presenting multiple paragraphs, sequentially ordered, and I guess scrollable (like a web page), but you are truncating all paragraphs. Seems like a strange thing to do, why are you doing that?
If you are presenting multiple paragraphs within a list, leverage the normal list usage whereby a User clicks on a list item to "drill-down" into that item (i.e. to read more).
If you are only truncating the last paragraph in a piece of written work, and you want to make the full text available, then you are going to need to add a means to navigate to the full piece of work: consider adding a button for that (if not already within a list item).
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Hiya. I am not making a mobile application just designing the mobile version of a web page. I am only presenting a long paragraph with loads of text. I am not allowed to cut text. I thought about a button but sometimes it’s not advisable to have too many buttons everywhere. Feb 3, 2020 at 11:31
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In a way, that button could be seen as the main call to action on that page: you want the User to consume your content.– strayaFeb 4, 2020 at 5:50