JCassara's History & New Media Blog

Design Assignment Version 1.0 is Up April 20, 2010

I’ve been working on my design assignment all week, and I think I’ve gotten to the point where I need to stop and reflect a bit before continuing to tinker with it. So I put up version 1.0 of the design assignment on my site. I might make a few small changes to it between now and class tomorrow, but it’s pretty much complete. Any feedback would be much appreciated. Thanks!

On this Week’s Readings April 11, 2010

This week’s readings were very interesting. I thought that both the Lost Museum and the Historic Tale Construction Kit were great examples of how historians can use digital technology to enhance the story they are trying to tell, and make history fun and accessible to users. Unfortunately, there is no chance I could replicate that type of website on my own. First of all, I don’t have the technical skill or know-how to even attempt to build a site like that. Secondly, those sites both rely heavily on Flash and JavaScript, both of which are big no-no’s in this class.

Therefore, I wanted to focus on Jakob Nielsen’s article on Participation Inequality. In the article, Nielsen confirmed what I have long suspected: the overwhelming majority of web users don’t actively participate/contribute to the sites they visit, they simply “lurk” in the background. I have suspected this because I am a “lurker” myself. I have a few websites that I visit multiple times a day, every single day. Several of these are blogs, however, not once have I chosen to comment. Personally, I have just never felt the need to share my thoughts/feelings on a particular topic with a community of anonymous strangers (even though most of those strangers have the same interests as me). I do however, read the comments sections of various blogs from time to time, and have noticed that a handful of users pop up time and time again. These are the people who Nielson calls “heavy contributors.” Only about 1% of internet users fall into this category.

As Nielsen notes, this participation inequality is problematic for various reasons. For one, it gives people a “biased understanding of the [site's] community, because many differences almost certainly exist between people who post a lot and those who post a little. And you would never hear from the silent majority of lurkers.” It is also problematic on site’s like Wikipedia, which rely almost entirely on user contributions. According to Nielsen, only about 0.2% of Wikipedia’s users are active contributers, and more significantly, the site’s “most active 1,000 people — 0.003% of its users — contribute about two-thirds of the site’s edits.” This means that a very small minority of the site’s users are controlling the vast majority of the site’s content. I’m sure that most of these people are very good at what they do and have the best intentions for the site in mind. Yet assuredly, some of them have particular biases and agendas that color the edits they make and the content they produce. Wikipedia really does tend to do a good job of self-policing its articles, so I’m not arguing that there are glaring problems in all their articles, but I do think it is problematic to know that so few people are responsible for the content of the site, when so many people rely on that site for information.

Unfortunately, Nielsen does not offer much hope for site creators who hope to encourage broader user participation. Indeed, he flatly states that “you can’t” overcome participation inequality. He does give a few suggestions, but his research indicates that trying to radically equalize the “90-9-1″ rule is a quixotic quest. I think that this article is an important one for people in class to keep in mind if they are considering creating a web site that relies heavily on user participation. However, in a history site, I would think most of the users that visit the site have specific interest in that historical topic, whether they are students, professors, or passionate amateurs. Therefore, I think its reasonable to assume that a higher percentage of users would participate/contribute to the site, especially if the site makes it clear that they need contributions to survive. Perhaps that assumption is wrong (Nielsen doesn’t provide any data on history websites), but I think that classmates who want to design sites that rely on user contributions should not lose hope after reading this article.

Thinking About “Don’t Make Me Think” April 6, 2010

Reading Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think made me think quite a bit about web design and web usability. I particularly enjoyed the section at the end of the chapter “The Home Page is Beyond Your Control” where Krug examined several homepages and asked “What’s the Point of This Site?” and “Do You Know Where to Start?” (p. 115-121). I think that keeping those two questions in mind when designing a web site is critical to creating a site that effectively conveys a message and is easy to navigate. Krug’s book was full of useful tidbits like that, and I found it extremely helpful in terms of visualizing how my final project site should look. Of course, I have to say “should” instead of “will” because I continue to struggle with applying the knowledge that I gain from our class readings to my actual site design. Indeed, there are still major discrepancies between what I want my site to look like, and what it actually looks like.

However, I have come to the realization that this problem is not unique to me or even to general amateur web designers. That is because the company I work for recently hired a design team to design and launch a new corporate website. Though I don’t have a major role in this process, I have gotten to sit-in on meetings related to the site design, and have gotten to see each new version of the site comps and mock-ups. What stands out from this experience is that even professional design teams struggle with how to capture someone’s vision for a page and actually build it into a successful, user-friendly site. Moreover, as Krug notes on page 125, everybody on a design team has “strong personal convictions about what makes a good Web site” so it is not easy for professional web designers to even agree on how a site should look. As Krug points out, the only real way to get an answer as to whether your design choices were successful is to get many people to test the site. Only then can you get a sense for “what works or doesn’t work” (129).

I am proud to say that my company has heeded Krug’s advice, and has sought feedback from myself and others during almost every stage of the design process. They have really tried to get a sense of what people like and don’t like about their prospective site. I will certainly keep this in mind when building my own site, and ask many people to look at it and test it out. However, in order to do that, I need my design skills to improve to the point where I won’t be embarrassed about having someone actually look over what I’ve created. Hey, we still have a few weeks, right?