There was a strange irony in reading Bill Buxton's Sketching User Experiences: Getting the Design Right and the Right Design on my Kindle. For those of you who don't have a Kindle, or something like it, it is a great reading experience for almost anyone who likes to read novels. But for reading scholarship, or even worse, a textbook with visuals, it is often another story. The Kindle is great for highlighting and note-taking and transferring those notes to your computer--that's not the problem. Any text that is intended to be read straight through will most likely provide no difficulties for the reader, but a text that has multiple references to a single visual found on one page, for example, and thus encourages the reader to flip back and forth (as you would with a traditional book) will provide a frustrating experience for the reader unless the Kindle version has links. Those that do have links, like Catherine Osborne's Presocratic Philosophy, can work quite well, but it is obvious that there has been a lot of work (sketching and prototypes, anyone?) put into making appropriate hypertext links and making it easy for the reader to navigate back and forth using the Kindle interface should he or she desire to do so.
Anyway, it was obvious from the start that Sketching User Experiences was never designed for the Kindle. And it made for a frustrating user experience. You don't realize how often an image is referenced in a text, especially when specifically intended for the reader to actually view it, until you can't find the image or figure without major bookmarking and push-button page flipping (a lot of "where was I again?".
From Buxton on the concept of Experience Design: "Despite the technocratic and materialistic bias of our culture, it is ultimately experiences that we are designing, not things" (Location 1663-64). Apparently, someone forgot to tell this important information to the people in charge of putting the author of this quote's book on the Kindle.
Most likely Buxton had little input into the process of putting his book on Kindle ("writers on design methodology do not necessarily always make the best designers" (2648):-), but it was difficult to read passages like the one above and those following without a bit of irritation rising to the surface or without some tongue-in-cheek. It would be interesting to learn the process of translating a book to Kindle effectively (obviously there is just the "make it a pdf" way--the noneffective way), because all this talk about ideation and creativity seems moot if your product hits a medium that itself mocks the message of the product in the act of communicating the product and its message. Bit of a brain twister there--both my sentence and my user experience.
"It takes almost as much creativity to understand a good idea, as to have it in the first place" (2600).
Buxton provides convincing examples of effective use of his methodologies for great design, such as The Wizard of Oz Technique and others for creating "timely, cheap, and quick to produce" interactive sketches. Assuming the book was created through a program like InDesign, a sketch of the Kindle version of Buxton's book wouldn't be difficult to demonstrate before making the actual software for the Kindle.
From Buxton again: "I hate the term "low-fidelity" prototype or interface. Why? Because when the techniques referred to are appropriately used, they are not low fidelity; rather, they are at exactly the right fidelity for their purpose. I love Scott [McCloud]'s phrase, amplification through simplification. It is brilliant. It says to me that the fidelity of a sketched rendering can be higher than reality--at least in terms of experience (which is ultimately what we care about). Pretty cool" (3480). Yes, pretty cool. And great advice. Now go tell your publisher.
To be fair, the Kindle came out about six months after Buxton's book. But if you're going to create the product . . . anyway, you get the idea. I think Buxton would be equally as unhappy with his product through this medium as I was, and wouldn't encourage a rush to design that his book on Kindle obviously was. Of course, I wouldn't have been as aware of this if I weren't digesting the information of his book in the process.
I think you raise an interesting point about the publication of Buxton's book on a Kindle and how the user experience doesn't work as well. I also think that we can extend this to all books in relation to e-publishing and how the content needs to change with the medium, something that Buxton does not explicitly discuss, but something that ventures in an undercurrent of his text.
ReplyDeleteYou mention one book that works well on a Kindle and said that work and planning must have gone into it. I think this is a necessary process that books should go through when translated to the Kindle or other e-readers, but publishers aren't necessarily going to put in that time and effort in that translation.
I also wonder if the Kindle and the Sony e-reader and the iPad use different software that requires the publishers to do transform into multiple platforms. This would be cost-prohibitive and time consuming.
But the larger question might be, how should the book change to take advantage of the medium?
We can also think about this issue in the classroom. We started our students working on their multimodal projects this week. With my students, I am asking them to first decide what narrative they want to tell, then to choose the medium to tell it in. Like Buxton's book on Kindle, I'm afraid my students will not adopt their message to the best suited medium. I like Emily's question "how should the book change to take advantage of the medium?" How can our students adopt their argument to take advantage of the medium?
ReplyDeleteOr for that matter, how can we do so in our Social Media Analysis?