Jones, Colleen. Clout: The Art and Science of Influential Web Content. Berkeley, CA: New Riders, 2010. Print.

Clout is about usability, not of interface architecture, but of content. While the two work hand-in-glove, the real work for me, and most rhetoricians/content providers/writers is with content. I jumped into her book with great expectations. This was only magnified when I noticed the title of her fourth chapter, "Rhetoric: The Art of Influence."In it she promised to ground her argument upon the insights of our tradition, while linking them to complexities of new media production.

Sadly, Jones definition of rhetoric is a little thin. She begins, and ends, with Aristotle's ethos, logos, and pathos. For Jones, these become credibility, logic and emotion. All of which are explained in extremely superficial ways. In ten pages devoted to the subject, the expository text makes up less than two. Her approach is to define a term and give a lot of mostly visual (screen shots and images) examples of her term. While illustration is essential to good instruction, Jones doesn't develop her definitions, implications, or links to examples well enough. Here are two examples, occurring directly after one another on page 54, using her subheadings and the entirety of the associated text:

Apply Emotion to Content

Content offers many opportunities to charm your users' emotions.    (no examples) 

Voice

It's the personality or feel of your content. Two very different examples are Bliss and HowStuffWorks.com. Bliss is sassy, while HowStuffWorks is dissecting.  (two screenshots)

There obviously is far more thinking involved in making "emotional appeals,"and more too voice than adding a modifying adjective. Both of these issues are lacking in the same way, there is no conception of audience. Audience, or User, is at the root of good design. Whether it be interfaces or layout, navigation or text, a concept of the Audience/User is critical. And critically lacking in Clout.


On the upside, this is probably a good book for introducing rhetoric, at its most basic level, to the conversation among web designers. Her experience is good, and some of her examples work well when she is discussing her actual practices, far removed from discussing  "the art of influence."

Two sound rhetorical principles she introduces, but still too thinly, are the importance or repetition and looking for, or creating, the right moment. She defines the terms Chronos and Kairos  in terms of clock v. opportunity. I am fascinated by the idea of kairos a "pregnant moment," or "the fullness of time." The good communicator needs to know what time it is, and how that impacts his audience and message.

Weinschenk, Susan. 100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People. Berkeley, CA: New Riders, 2011. Print.

Weinschenk is psychologist and an interface designer. She writes and consults about applied cognitive psychology in the field technology. This little book contains facts about the way humans see, read, remember, think, focus, feel, decide, make mistakes, relate socially, and are motivated. It is exactly the type of knowledge Hoekman advices learning to make good situational scenarios to guide design. This information helps both interface design, and content creation. About 40 % of the facts seemed relevant to my project, both for the web design and for the creation of compelling interviews. Here are some nuggets:

Web Design

• People scan based on past experience and expectations. Incorporate conventions.
• People see cuesthat tell them what to do with an object. The movie player buttons.
• People believe that things closer together belong together. Use chunking, and allow enough space between unrelated items.
• Meanings of colors vary by culture. Does this extrapolate downward to sub-culture, like Evangelical Christian Americans?
• Reading and Comprehending are two different things. Goal is useful information that is understood and acted upon, not text.
• Reading a computer screen is harder than reading paper. Pay attention to fonts/colors/size/line length/etc.
• People process information in bite-sized chunks. Description, instructions, information needs to tight.
• People remember only four items at once. Implications for tags, searches, and organization schemes. Limit choices to a manageable load.
• People create mental models. Design must conform to mental model for ease of use, or it must easily teach a new model.
• People interact with conceptual models. Keep in mind the user, who will be doing and learning from the model/application you create. Limit activity that is unhelpful/difficult/confusing to them, reward activity that helps them achieve goals.
• Well practiced skills don't require conscious action. If immersion is the goal, the architecture of the application needs to be invisible. Conventions.
• People can't actually multi-task.  Immersion is a viable goal.
•  People want more choices and information than they can process. True UCD is about goals and applications that meet those goals, not stated desires.

Interviews

• People are hard-wired for imitation and empathy. The sympathetic of exemplary lives can motivate people to emulate godly attitudes and habits.
• Doing things together bonds people together. Stories of a shared faith-life.
• People expect online interactions to follow social rules. Should resemble church setting sharing, not media iterview.
• Speakers brains and listeners' brains sync up during communication. (mirror neurons) The conversation between myself and listeners is a vital ingredient.
• People can enter a flow state. Edit to hold attention.
• Culture affects how people think. Care about straddling two cultures, individual church affiliation and common Christian and American.
• People process best in story form.
• Anecdotes persuade more than data.
• People use look and feel as their first indicator of trust. (careful set design strategy)
• Pastoral scenes make people happy. Outside interviews?
• The more difficult something is to achieve, the more people like it. Discuss weight matters.
• People make most decisions unconsciously. The act of sharing story impacts decisions.

Hoekman, Robert. Designing the Obvious: A Common Sense Approach to Web and Mobile Application Design. Berkeley, CA: New Riders, 2007. Print.

Hoekman writes a book that is very similar to the other advocates for "user-centered" design strategies, yet with a twist. He offers all the standard fare; a user-centered design schema, simplicity as a virtue, the need to design accommodating/polite/intuitive interfaces, resistance to feature creep, refinement strategies, etc. He also adds a timely admonition and chapter to "Think Mobile," I find particularly helpful. Where Hoekman offers something new is in his rejection of Cooper's use of personas for modeling the end user.

Hoekman does agree on modeling, but prefers designing for particular behavior/task over a fictional personas.  He believes personas are confusing and an unnecessary distraction for designers, and because Cooper uses personas in conjunction with scenarios Hoekman says the backstory is superfluous and the scenario is the key. Design for the situation, because it doesn't matter who the user is the rest of the time, when using your application they are all the same. Research should focus on how people think and the ways they go about tasks involved with your application. The data is still collected through ethnographic research techniques, and still creates fact based models, but there is no character accompanying the model. This makes some sense if, as Hoekman asserts, design teams get bogged down in the fictional backstories accompanying personas. It could be situational design strategies, when coupled to other evolved conventions like simplicity, clean task flows, and machine courtesy are sufficient to the task. It would simplify the design process. Steve Jobs died a few day before this post, and he famously did not do user research but his own team's common sense to design state of the art, elegant interfaces.



Key Takeaways


Quickly transform Beginners to Intermediary users. I have read this before. Users to technology don't stay beginners very long. If it is well designed they learn what is necessary and useful to their goals, if not they give up. Also, users rarely become experts, so avoid overcomplicated design or a plethora of features. The goal is a quick and painless ramp up from first-time user to competent (if not expert) frequent user.


Learn and use Psychology.  Not "I'm okay...You're okay," but what does cognitive psychological research teach us about memory, the way people process data, colors, etc.


Think Mobile. The idea here is to think of your application existing beyond the bounds of a desktop computer screen. Will it work on a smart phone, on a moving and noisy bus? He suggest keeping a tablet and phone beside your work station as you design to help consider the other vehicles for your app.

Garrett, Jesse James. The Elements of User Experience: User Centered Design for the Web and Beyond, 2nd Edition. Berkeley, CA: New Riders, 2011. Print.

Garrett does main strength is in describing the design process. He lays out five "planes," or levels of activity making up the web design process. He created this diagram, that is widely referenced in other literature about user centered design:

Image from: http://www.jjg.net/elements/

I found this to be most useful for visualizing the process of website creation as a totality, but unable to answer many questions about implementation priorities. First,  while the requisite "user-centered" phrase is often mentioned in his book, and is conceptually foundational to his schema, he doesn't elaborate on how one gathers information about the user, or integrates that knowledge into the design. The other issue, a key one for those interested in developing content, is his emphasis on the technical demands of the interface over the rhetorical demands of content creation and maintenance. Kristina Halvorson points this out in Content Strategy for the Web when she writes, "...content is not a feature. It's a complex, ever-evolving, intricate body of information that requires ongoing care and feeding. It's not something you can check off on a list and be done with." Garrett concept of content, appearing as a design consideration only in the planning phase, reveals a limited view of the user. The designers in this system only need to think of the user as he or she relates to the interface and information architecture, not a person pursuing other goals, that just happen to be happening over a digital interface.

Our tradition, while considerate of the technological platform and its role in shaping and delivering messages, emphasizes the communicative act over the technology. Garrett's book is written too much from the perspective of the developer and the technological demands, and not enough from the perspective of the user, or those tasked with understanding and serving that users desires. Though his design process has merits, it needs modification to be truly "user-centered."

Cooper, Alan, David Cronin and Robert Reimann. About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design. Indianapolis, IN: Wiley Publishing, 2007. Print.

This book has to be the bible of user-centered design. Its comprehensive approach is both daunting and obvious, because of scientific approach. Where other books point out the gap between the IT developer and the end user, About Face offers solutions to bridge the gap. Cooper, et al, offer solutions beyond mere anecdotes or psychological tidbits designed to increase empathy for the novice, technologically challenged, on behalf of developers. Rather, they present a method for finding out exactly who the user are, their expectations, their habits, etc. that is grounded in solid ethnographic research methodology, used by an array of social sciences, and our own field's research on the writing process (where it exists).
After gathering real qualitative and quantitative data the author's put forth a process by which they create synthetic, representative personas engaging in simulated behavioral modeling scenarios. These approximations become the users for their design process. Though this audience is, like any audience, a necessary fiction, it is a reasoned, scientific, data produced fiction, not the imaginings of design team. Creating Cooper's personas, is an expensive (time/money) undertaking, but those who implement their plan have the advantage of user that pushes back against the process.

Two other things about this text. First, the end product Cooper's process creates seems to be a simplified, easier to use application. They continually stress simplification and refinement of design and implementation. An example that resonated with me is the advice to remove the computer from your concept of the product, think instead only of the application. The implication being the computer is a tool for the desires of the use, and not and imposing entity or limitation.

Second, though Cooper's process is aimed at simplification, it is not simple to implement. This book seems to be an exhaustive resource covering each step of the design phase in great detail. The one challenge I have from this is the need to scale down their process to my own limited resources and budget. That being said, even shadows of their process will help my design and end result.


Key Concepts:

Design
"The conscious and intuitive effort to impose meaningful order."  Victor Papanek

Human-oriented design activities

• Understanding users' desires, needs, motivations and contexts.
• Understand business, technical, and domain opportunities, requirements and constraints.
• Synthesize this knowledge as a foundation for creating products whose form, content, and behavior is useful, usable and desirable, as well as economically and technologically feasible.

Interaction Design
Design based on and understanding of users and cognitive principles, combined with aesthetic choice.

Goals
An expectation of an end condition achieved through organized activities and steps. Products should be designed to attain goals, not showcase features.

Goal Directed Design Process
Research (user and domain) > Modeling> Requirements (economic and technical) > Framework (define design structure and flow) > Refinement > Support.

Research Phase employs ethnographic field study techniques, to provide qualitative data about potential and/or actual users. Study will produce an emergent set of behavior patterns used during modelling phase to create persona helpful in establishing goals for product creation. (Chapter 4)

Modelling Phase is where behavior and work flow patterns discovered through research are synthesized into domain and user models that become test mules for measuring goal achievement during product development. These models are called personas, which are detailed composite archetypes representing groupings of behaviors, attitudes, aptitudes, goals and motivations observed through research. These represent users during the modelling phase. Mental modelling is also used to represent technical and business requirements. ( Chapter 5)

Requirements Definition Phase is a bridge between users (represented by personas), and the technical, business and functional (developed through mental models) are reconciled into a document that defines all of these needs.

Framework Definition Phase is where the overall product concept is placed into a framework for the product's behavior, visual design and physical form. An interaction framework definition is the end result of a designer's using interaction design principles to develop interaction design patterns containing general solutions to previously analyzed problems. The interaction framework definition becomes the template for testing input vectors and form factors. Also this definition will give rise to a visual framework and a visual language strategy.

Refinement Phase continues, from the Framework Definition phase, adding interaction details. User input is still included through persona interaction including key path and validation scenarios. Visual refinement continues. The end result of this phase is a form and behavior specification, a detailed documentation, in print or interactive media, of the actual design.

Development Support Phase is where the designers help solve unforeseen development issues, including helping prioritizing design solutions when deadlines/budgets encroach on original plans.

Krug, Steve. Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, 2nd Edition. Berkeley, CA: New Riders, 2011. Print.

Krug wrote a very accessible primer on the subject of usability. It is concise, easy to read and seems push only a few important themes and points. These begin with a generalized view of the internet user that doesn't read web pages as much as glaces over them. His web user is impatient and unwilling to give much energy toward figuring out how to use a site, "Don't Make Me Think." The entire book is about simplifying design, so this type of impatient user will find what they want, or what you are offering. This approach is probably essential in a commercial setting, where the user wants to find the product or service and the goal of the website is to create that transaction. I am not sure simplicity needs to be the overarching measure on all sites or applications, though complexity for its own sake is a mistake. Some sites/applications (including the one I am designing) are not about a commercial transaction, but an experience. Having the material well organized and navigable is important, but exploration of topics may be just as important as moving toward a preconceived transaction.

Still, Krug's advice is sound and these are important takeaways:

Obviousness. The designer should take care make the actions and choices available of the website obvious to the uninitiated user. If they end up on your site they should be able to engage your material without a tutorial.

Reading/Scanning. People do tend to scan web pages, though it is not true that people don't read on a computer screen. They are likely to read deeper content when they have select to do so, rather than when they are trying find that content. Use the design process to guide scanning eyes to my content, rather than resist the practice.

Billboards. Krug says websites should work like billboards that are readable at 60 mph, i.e. easily discerned messages and directions for glancing eyes. Elements include a clear visual hierarchy, use of conventions, pages divided into defined areas, lack of busyness, and making obvious what is clickable (31-39). Integrating these principles aids navigation, and simplifies a cluttered site.

Writing. Concise writing without needless words. Good advice, but there is more to creating content than Krug offers. In fact, his book is so concerned with not thinking it creates a problem for the implementation of certain, complex content.

Navigation. Krug's largest chapter is devoted to navigation, and I think it contained the most useful ideas. He explains how the web experience has no real form, no scale, no sense of direction, no sense of location. These are artificial constructs, and the responsibility of the designer:

"I think we talk about Web navigation because " figuring out where you are" is a much more pervasive problem on the Web that in physical spaces. We're inherently lost when we're on the web, and we can't peek over the aisles to see where we are. Web navigation compensates for this missing sense of place by embodying the site's hierarchy, creating a sense of there. Navigation isn't just a feature of a Web site; it is the Web site, in the same way that the building, the shelves, and the cash registers are Sears."(59)

The navigation creates a sense of place including:

• Something to hold on to when we feel lost.
• Tells us what the site contains.
• How to use the site.
• Instill confidence in the abilities of the persons who built the site.

Home page. An obvious point Krug makes is about the route people take onto a website. Because of search engines, many times a user will end up deep in the site, and not at the home page. This affects not only the navigation from any page but also should be considered when designing the home page. It should not be the central portal to the site, like a hub that all pages proceed from, rather it has specific purposes. The home page is the heart of the site, and the designer needs to make all of the site reflect (not duplicate) its purpose. Elements include:

• Site identity and mission.
• Site hierarchy.
• Search.
• Teases (Content promos and Feature promos).
• Timely content.
• Deals. 
• Shortcuts.
• Registration.
• What I am looking for...
• ...and what I am not looking for.
• Show me where to start.
• Establish credibility and trust.

Usabilty testing. Usability testing brings fresh eyes to the process, that can become too familiar, and therefore blind to content and flaws. Krug stresses testing at whatever level of sophistication/cost you can provide, and it should be done early and often in the process. It is not focus group testing, which is more concerned with content an meaning. Usability testing is about getting from point a to point b.

Krug stresses the need to do usability testing as a courtesy to the end user, and as away to build ethos and credibility.

Miscellaneous. Krug devotes a couple of short chapters to accessibility issues, Cascading style sheets and how to deal with clients who want to implement bad design. These were not useful, except to introduce the topics.