Week 6: Accessibility & User Experience

        We are drawing on a close to my Digital Writing course, as possibly as a result, this blog. I've enjoyed writing these posts. Some of the posts felt like I was reiterating my readings to a niche audience--generally my professor and some of my classmates. Some of my posts surprised me--the coalescing of my courses, previous knowledge, and special interests. In some respects, I hope I continue blogging--or at the very least, writing articles or opinion pieces on my various learnings and musings. As I've mentioned before, I've already committed myself to life-long learning.

        There are times when writing these posts felt meta--self-referential--in a way that was kind of unnatural. I spent a lot of time thinking and writing about my writing. My last post is on accessibility and the user experience. Accessibility is a fundamental part of user experience (UX). Fashioned after architecture, UXD has incorporated design thinking elements to enhance the user experience of web design, mobile apps, and other products. Without consideration of accessibility, a design could alienate and exclude an entire user base.

        With consideration to accessibility in my own blog, I've made an effort to add alt. text to every image I've used in my entries and in my logo. When choosing the colors, I remembered that stark contrast can cause eye fatigue so for the background I choose a white with a hint of color, and for the test, I choose a black that had less saturation. I used Google Fonts for the fonts, choosing both a serif for the headings and a sans-serif for the body of text. The variation of fonts adds visual interest, but I've read that sans-serif fonts are easier for individuals with learning disabilities to read. Also, Google Fonts are free and generally considered web accessible.

        I wish that I could have done more to improve the accessibility of my blog. I should have considered individuals who have colorblindness when choosing the colors--I don't know how that affects the accessibility of my blog in the context of their unique experiences.

        In the context of my experience with UX from my studies, I’ve previously mentioned that I used a theme designed by Sadaf F. K. and edited some of the HMTL to customize the look to my liking. By doing this I utilized a top-down approach, using a current design and editing it to suit my needs. UX favors a bottom-up approach to design, starting with early iterations that may consider the user’s journey or a user’s persona before even putting a design to the test. Another component of UX that I love and that I wish I could have written on more is the collaborative aspect of it. Just as Rheingold discusses the collaborative experience of writing in digital spaces—such as coauthorship of comments on blog posts or collaborative writings of wikis—UX depends on the collaboration of unique perspectives and experiences of designers, researchers, writers (and even users!) to create a design experience.

           While there is so much more I could have done for my blog, I want to nudge a gentle reminder for those who need it—done is better than perfect <3 

Best,

Kay

References:

Rheingold, H (2012). Net Smart: How to Thrive Online. Cambridge: The MIT Press. 

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Week 5: Writing & Designing in a Public Sphere

 Image Source: Kaytlin Jones (designed in Canva)

Without reiterating the entirety of my essay on the infographic I designed, I’d like to briefly outline the process. I started with Rheingold’s practice of mindfulness for training our attention. I’ve written about that previously, which you can read about here.

To start, I read and reread the portions on mindfulness and meditation in Chapter 1 of “Net Smart: How To Thrive Online” by Howard Rheingold. I used a notebook to jot down some notes on topics and methods Rheingold brings up in these sections. He doesn’t offer step-by-step instructions on how to meditate, so I synthesized the key points he made on meditation and mindfulness and attempted to arrange them into steps.

After taking notes on the contents of the infographic, I made a wireframe for the design. This was several lines arranged into boxes with a placeholder title. The longer rectangular boxes are placeholders for text and the boxes with the Xs inside are placeholders for images. 

Image Source: Kaytlin Jones (created using Canva)

Best,

Kay

References:

Rheingold, H (2012). Net Smart: How to Thrive Online. Cambridge: The MIT Press. 

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Week 3: Visual Rhetoric, an opinion

In my previous blog post, I explained my interdisciplinary. Read that post here if you haven't already.

As for Visual Rhetoric, I likewise maintain an interdisciplinary view. As a major in professional writing, I often view visual rhetoric as a book design or magazine layout. Pictures and chunks of information are arranged to guide the readers from one piece of information to another piece to depict a logical and coherent argument. Books, while rarer, can do this as well.

Image source: Flickr user Mike Schroeder

In "Slaughterhouse-Five", Vonnegut arranges drawings throughout the text narrative to complement the plot. In "House of Leaves," Mark Z. Danielewski takes textual space and visual rhetoric to a unique and ambitious level. Danielewski uses arguments in "Space of Poetics," by the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard, as a philosophical and literary foundation for writing and compiling "House of Leaves." As you can see depicted in the image below, Danielewski uses visual design principles to create an inter-textual narrative that adds greater depth and texture to the substance of the story.

Image source: Walking the Forest Floor by Aditi Sonak

As a student of psychology, specifically human factors and UXD (user experience design), I've considered web design as less a practice of aesthetics--as image and design for the sake of the design--but a practice of human experience and interaction. How do users experience and interact with the information presented? Digital writing also considers the reader's experience through reading content, interacting with content, and commenting on content. In some theories on digital writing, a reader's comment gives them co-authorship of the piece. I've written some about that here.

But to bring the argument back to UX, designers are less concerned with the aesthetics of a website or app but with the user’s experience of the design itself. This is the core of their work. They will conduct case studies and report back with user journeys, and character profiles, and analyze user pain points. For UX designers, this is a study in visual rhetoric, and in some ways, kinesthetic and cognitive rhetoric.

But for graphic designers, this is visual rhetoric.

Ok, so what about digital writers? We must consider the reader’s experience on a visual level--that of graphic and website designers--as well as an interactive level--that of UX designers. For this blog, I utilized a free template created by Sadaf F. K. of Design Bliss. But the template didn't work for my purposes, so I edited some of the HTML with my limited knowledge of such and altered some design and aesthetics. I made these changes with consideration to the visual rhetoric of this blog.

Just as Vonnegut's illustrations and Danielewski's inter-textual compositions serve a narrative purpose inside their respective novels, the visual design of a blog should contribute to its overall rhetorical purpose--that is the argument it's trying to make or the story it's trying to tell.

Best,

Kay

References:

Rheingold, H (2012). Net Smart: How to Thrive Online. Cambridge: The MIT Press. 

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Week 2: Co-Authorship & Responsibilities of a Blogger

My current undergraduate field of study is Professional Writing which falls under Interdisciplinary Studies in the College of Arts and Letters at Old Dominion University. I've spent many years studying undergrad; so much so that I used to make a joke saying I wanted to become a professional student (I'm certain this is still my primary goal). But at 33, the time has come for me to complete my bachelor’s degree. Anyhow, during my undergraduate career, I’ve previously majored in English as well as Psychology. Now, I can see how an interdisciplinary degree is the perfect fit for me.

This week's lesson in my Digital Writing course is on digital rhetoric with an emphasis on multimedia an equal component to the sphere of digital writing as the writing itself. This means elements of web design such as layout, color, text appearance, graphics, and pictures are as integral to the writing itself.

As a previous English major, I am conflicted. As a previous Psych major, I am intrigued, and quite possibly agree. What is the responsibility of a blogger in terms of digital writing? If we have well-written content but a poorly designed website does that mean the writing is also bad? I get it, it's about presentation. But it reminds me of the situation with J.D. Salinger when the publisher designed a book cover for his collection of short stories titled after one in the collection called "To Esme, with Love and Squalor." Despite whatever personal feelings anyone may have towards J.D. Salinger, anyone who has read the story knows *spoiler alert* that the story features a young soldier about to ship out and he meets a young girl with whom they develop a friendship. The girl, Esme, writes letters to the soldier which help him to maintain a grip on reality while he suffers from what appears to be PTSD. Soon, the letters stop arriving and the soldier appears to suffer from a nervous breakdown.

When the publishers got ahold of Salinger's collection of stories an artist went to work designing the cover without having read the stories, so the result was a painting of an adult blonde woman with a sexually provocative appearance. Salinger was livid because Esme was portrayed in a way that didn't accurately reflect the story at all. From that point forward, Salinger insisted all his book covers be completely plain, that’s why to this day any title by Salinger has a minimal design, generally solid or block colors, and black or white font.

It could be interpreted that Salinger might have been better off if could have designed his own book cover from the start. But Salinger is a writer, not a visual artist. Or at least that was not his profession, and it seems in the publishing world, writers have little say in the appearance of their novels, though that seems to be changing. With blogging, the writer has full control over the appearance of all their content, whether they are knowledgeable in web or graphic design, HTML, hyperlinks, etc. So, a blogger could design a website (or haphazardly slap one together due to inexperience), but that web design becomes a reflection of the text itself. It becomes the focal point, the book cover so to speak which we judge the written contents before reading because despite the adage, “never judge a book by its cover,” my psychology studies have shown me that we have ingrained heuristics we’ve established to shortcut our cognitive decision making—so we do in fact judge books by their covers, however subconsciously. Of course, we also peruse the back cover synopsis, the reviews printed across the front, and sometimes the introductions and forwards, or we pull up Google or Goodreads to get a quick overview of the reviews before we purchase or rent the title. We're humans, we're multi-faceted like that. So we judge our books by their cover, synopsis, Goodreads reviews, and word of mouth.

But a sexualized Esme on the cover can completely alter a reader’s expectation, and completely alarm a writer who intended the story to portray a different story.

So, reader, what Esme does my blog portray? What Esme is your blog going to portray? 

Image source: Southern Cross Review

        I'll leave you with a more accurate illustration that better depicts the story--click the image to read the story for yourself.

Best,

Kay

References:

Rheingold, H (2012). Net Smart: How to Thrive Online. Cambridge: The MIT Press. 

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Week 1: Infotention

My major is in professional writing and my minor is in psychology. My interests lie in the realm of writing (creatively and professionally), psychology, and user experience (UX). As an aspiring UX designer (possibly UX writer), I am very interested in the concept of attention in the digital space (i.e. the internet, mobile apps, etc.). A UX designer designs experiences for people--we conduct research, put ourselves in the shoes of our hypothetical users, and map out their potential journeys. We will plan each individual step that they will take before our product, during, and after.

Attention has a lot to do with this process. In the digital space, websites, apps, games, books, music, social media, and influencer content are all vying for our attention. Rheingold discusses the importance of training our attention in a world overloaded with information. One method Rheingold suggests to train our attention is mindfulness meditation.

Image Source: NTT Communication Science Laboratories

As I’ve stated, my minor is in psychology and one course I’ve taken alongside digital writing is a course on human cognition. In that course, there was a module on meditation. There are two main forms of meditation according to cognitive psychology: focused attention meditation (FA) and open monitoring meditation (OM). FA meditation is a form of meditation where the individual directs their attention on a point of focus, generally the inhalations and exhalations of the breath, but sometimes it is a mantra or a visualization. OM meditation is a practice where the individual does not direct the focus of their attention and instead remains receptive and aware of any thoughts, emotions, bodily sensations, or external stimuli that arise during the practice.

Without exploring the differences in these meditation methods, Rheingold discusses a FA approach to meditation to train our attention. This may be viewed as spotlight awareness—a type of awareness where we maintain our focus and attention. OM meditation may be viewed as lantern awareness where we maintain an orb of unfocused awareness without necessarily being drawn to any specific stimuli.

The reason I bring up my aspirations for UX writing and design is that in order to empathize with the user, UXers must learn to focus and unfocus their attention in such a way that mirrors how the users will interact with their product design. A UXer can maintain lantern awareness for their own perceptions and expectations of a product design, then switch to spotlight awareness from the perspective of their user.

This flexibility of focused attention, which can be trained and strengthened by alternating between FA and OM meditations, may be beneficial to areas. Rheingold asserts the importance that training attention has for investigating and appraising research. Attention training is a tool that can be used for many areas of life including our careers, creative projects, personal goal setting, and so on. The investment of training our attention and awareness seems to yield a significant result that attunes our information receptors and aids us in navigating the ever-expanding content creation that we experience in digital spaces.

Best,

Kay

References:

Rheingold, H (2012). Net Smart: How to Thrive Online. Cambridge: The MIT Press. 

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