Why do people like PDFs?
by Angus Gordon
PDF documents have a bad name among content professionals. We all know the problems: PDFs are terrible to read on phones, they force a bloated download on the user, it takes work to make them accessible, they’re painful to update, a black box to internal search engines, and so on.
And yet, we still have PDFs. Lots of PDFs. Our users and stakeholders keep telling us, through words and actions, that they like PDFs, at least for some things. Perhaps we should start asking why.
Why users like PDFs
Let’s start, as we should, with our users. Of course, users don’t always like PDFs – for example, people rightly resent having to download a PDF to look at a restaurant menu.
But I’ve often heard people in interviews and testing express a preference for a PDF over a web page for some kinds of content – especially long-form content where a lot of detail is needed.
As researchers, we’re trained to ignore what users say they want and focus on how they act. Most of the time, that’s the right approach. But when we hear users repeatedly and consistently say the same thing, it’s worth at least asking whether there’s something there.
So why do users like PDFs for some types of content? Here’s some of what I’ve heard:
Completeness. Downloading a file gives users a reassuring sense they’ve got everything they need. Too often, web pages don’t give them that reassurance. Core content is split over multiple pages, or ‘related content’ sends people down endless rabbit holes, never giving them confidence they’ve reached the end.
Permanence. When someone downloads a PDF, they can file it away for safekeeping. They might have an out-of-date version of the thing, but at least they have the thing. With a web page, there’s always the possibility it won’t exist next time they come to the website, or they won’t be able to find it again.
Shareability. Attach a PDF to an email and you can be confident the other person has received it. Share a URL, and you never quite know whether it will work, whether your friend will have to log in to see the content, or (in this age of personalisation) whether they’ll see the same thing you do.
Why stakeholders like PDFs
It's the bane of digital teams everywhere: we keep telling our internal stakeholders that PDFs are old hat, and they keep telling us to put them on the website anyway.
This can make us grumpy: our colleagues are ‘stuck in the print age’, we say, or something equally dismissive. But again, when we actually listen to those colleagues explain why they want to use PDFs, what we hear are often genuine concerns.
Design options. Often, stakeholders create PDFs simply because they can’t do what they want in the CMS. Constraints are good, of course! But sometimes, there’s a genuine need for a design solution that’s trivially easy to create in a PDF, but impossible in the CMS without time-consuming development effort.
Workflow. In organisations with bottlenecks in the publishing workflow (that is, most of them), getting a PDF approved and put on the website can be much quicker than getting a new web page published, especially in cases where the content is also published in print.
Version control. It’s possible to do version control with a web page, but most organisations don’t do it, or don’t make it visible to the relevant people. With a PDF and a document control policy (which most organisations have had since the stone age), you always know what version you’re looking at.
What should we do?
So, as content people, do we just give up on our efforts to wean people off PDFs? Absolutely not: the problems are still there.
But rather than just telling people why PDFs are bad, we need to understand the ‘jobs to be done’ they look to PDFs for. That way, we can design content systems that do the same jobs as well or better.
One simple example: we can give people a sense of completeness by letting them reach the end of something without giving them more work to do. So instead of vague headings in the imperative mood like ‘Read more’ or ‘See also’, let’s make it clear that our related content is optional. Some ways of doing this are: ‘You might also like’, ‘More about this topic’, or one I really love from Jorge Arango: ‘Also worth your attention’.
Speaking of which, here's what we think is also worth your attention: