Prepare to Merge: Streamlining My Interests Into One Blog

 
You may have noticed that I've added some posts to this blog that relate, in one way or another, to communication theory.  I want to take this opportunity to explain why I'm including them here and why I'm adding these posts now.

(photo: found here and used in accordance with a Creative Commons license)

My interests are many and varied, and when I can draw connections between them and share them with others, I'm thrilled.  However, when I first started this blog, I wasn't sure of the exact direction I wanted it to take and what kinds of topics I wanted to cover (apart from usability and psychology).

My original idea was to create two separate blogs: one for me to talk about usability, psychology, and related topics, and another for me to write about communication theory.  Then, one of my potential readers suggested that I try to incorporate my communication theory posts into this blog, a practice that would allow me to focus my energy on one blog and one readership rather than two.

I liked this idea, but then I wasn't sure how I would blend the two topics together in a way that really made sense and didn't seem forced.  Thus, for the past few months, I have kept notes on what I've wanted to say about communication theory and held off on finalizing and posting them until this week.

I think (or hope?) that I've done a good job of integrating communication theory and usability/psychology.  I've posted them according to the corresponding dates of my notes, and I've given them the label "theory" for easy retrieval.

I hope you enjoy my postings (and maybe even learn as much as I have during the process of writing them).  I also hope that you will continue down this road of the blogosphere with me.

As always, comments and questions are welcome.

Thank you.

The Story So Far: A Reflection on My Blogging Experience

In this post, I will talk about my experience with creating, maintaining, and updating Wired for Writing, my very first blog.

When I first created this blog and started writing in it, I didn't have too firm of a grasp of exactly "how" a person writes in a blog ("What should the tone be?  Can I go 'off-topic' from my mission statement?"), since I hadn't read blogs on a regular basis.  My only experience with reading blogs at that time was when one would pop up in my search results for something else I was looking for.

In short, I was a little intimidated.

At the beginning, it became obvious that I was a frustrated novelist: my posts were pretty long.  In whatever I do, I try to be comprehensive, which I suppose is an admirable trait in most circumstances.

In my efforts to find material to write about, I truly learned a great deal about topics like usability, social media, and design.  When I wrote my posts, I wanted to share what I had found with you, including pictures and links to outside material whenever possible and appropriate.

As time went on, I did my best to be more careful with my word choices so that I wouldn't have to use so many words to get my points across.  I also "loosened up" a little bit and tried to make my posts sound different from everyone else's in the blogosphere.  I tried to have fun with my posts and treat them like little creative writing projects.  I hope that came across and that my posts have been fun for you, the reader, as well.

So, what's next?  Who knows.  I definitely want to keep posting here and updating the look and feel of the blog as I learn more about design and CSS.

In the meantime, do you have any suggestions for changes you'd like to see in the blog?  Anything about it that you strongly like or dislike?  Any writer needs to know her audience, so please share you thoughts.

Thank you for taking the time to read my writing.

Shameless Self-Promotion: My Social Media Proposal

My most recent project has been to develop a proposal for defero, a media consulting company that is looking to make the jump into a Web 2.0 world.  You can view it here.  Once again, I used Google Sites to create and host my site.  I noticed that my work on Google Sites went a lot smoother than last time.  I guess experience is the best teacher.

In order to create an effective proposal, I needed to research how companies are using social media and find examples of its effective use by corporations.  During this process, I learned a great deal about the different ways that companies are maximizing the potential of the technologies that I often take for granted. I use social media on a daily basis (and often more than once a day): I log into Twitter regularly (but you probably figured that one out already), and I also check my Facebook account on a near-daily basis.  Like most people my age (mid-20s), I'm a huge fan of YouTube and have over a hundred videos on my Favorites list.  I've dabbled in social bookmarking, and I've come to rely on Wikipedia when I want to find basic information about a topic (linking to a Wikipedia article about Wikipedia...doesn't get much more meta than that).  And, of course, I blog.

But I never gave much thought to how corporate entities would use these tools.  When companies began to use platforms like Facebook to spread their message, I actually resented it a little bit.  I figured that I was already bombarded with advertisements and longed for the days of my early Internet experience (circa 1997) when ads on the Internet weren't as intrusive and pervasive as they can be today.  But then I remembered how the times when I got kicked off my dial-up connection about ten times per night and how slow the pages would load, and I thanked my lucky stars that the Internet/technology in general had advanced as much as it did over the past twelve years.  But I digress....

As I learned more about the corporate use of social media, I found examples that I had never seen before and made a mental note of which companies I thought were most innovative.  For instance, I had no idea that Adobe had a Delicious account where it shared links and resources with its customers.  And I also wasn't aware of the existence of Coca-Cola's Facebook page (which, I might add, is the best corporate presence on Facebook that I've ever seen).  I give Coca-Cola a lot of credit: the company has been around for over a hundred years, and yet its page is twice as rich as those of some companies that are half as old.

The more I researched, the more I saw that social media is really a reiterative, circular process: post content that you find or create for others to talk about, get exposed to cool/informative content posted by others, repeat.  At least, that's how it seems to be for companies.  An individual can merely absorb content without contributing any, but where's the fun in that?

I also found that as I was exposed to more corporate use of social media, I began to view companies that didn't make use of social media tools to be behind the times and irrelevant.  Is that fair?  Maybe, maybe not.  But it does speak to the power and importance of having a Web 2.0 marketing strategy and presence.

How about you: what do you think of my proposal?  Do you have any memorable experiences with company-generated social media content?  Do you think that corporations who don't use social media are irrelevant?  Share away!

Three Flavors of "Smart": Sternberg's Theory of Triarchic Intelligence

 
Do you know anyone who's really "booksmart" and did great in school but can't seem to accomplish what they want to in life?  Or how about someone who's very creative and clever but isn't living up to his or her full potential?

Prof. Robert J. Sternberg has an explanation.  His research suggests that there are really three different types of intelligence, which each person has to varying degrees.

Sternberg's three intelligences are as follows (and you can also look at this summary):

1. Analytic – good at “reasoning abstractly, acquiring knowledge, processing information, and planning and executing strategies” (Howard 54)

2. Creative – excels at “using experience, insight, and creativity to solve new problems, create new ideas, or combine unrelated facts” (Howard 54)

3. Practical – does well at “adapting to contexts; selecting or shaping one's environment” (Howard 54)

So, how are these intelligences observed?  According to Sternberg:

"The kinds of tasks people face in everyday life often require all three kinds of thinking. For example, selling a product requires one to analyze customers' needs, to invent a sales strategy, and to convince people to buy a product. Managing a business requires one to analyze market requirements, create products or services as well as a demand for them, and then to convince people of the value of dealing with the company. But the fact that many tasks require all three kinds of thinking does not mean that people…are equally adept at all three kinds of thinking" (n.p.).

I guess a good analogy to make here is that the three type of intelligence are like the three flavors in Neapolitan ice cream: they're designed to work together, and the more you have of each, the better off you are (unless you're lactose intolerant...then I just feel sorry for you).

(winter needs to end so I can have this or something like it)

(photo: found here and used in accordance with a Creative Commons license)

At any rate, these intelligences translate into different ways of learning and of seeing the world.  Because I'm interested in usability and its implications, the theory of triarchic intelligence makes me wonder if people with different levels of intelligence would disagree on what makes a website "usable."

For example, would someone with a high level of practical intelligence and lower levels of analytic and creative intelligence find a site like this (a School of Management) to be easier to use than this one (an Economics Department)?  How about this one (a Lifelong Kindergarten media lab)?  I tend to think so.

What do you think?  Share your thoughts by leaving a comment.

Works Cited:

Howard, Bruce C., Steven McGee, and Namsoo Shin. "The Triarchic Theory of Intelligence and Computer-Based Inquiry Learning." Educational Technology Research and Development 49 4 (2001): 49-69. Print.

Sternberg, Robert J. "Patterns of Giftedness: A Triarchic Analysis." Roeper Review 22 4 (2000): 231-5. Print.

I Love When the Sum is Greater Than its Parts: Collaboration Online

 
As Internet-based applications become more prevalent and sophisticated, opportunities for collaborating online will continue to increase and offer more effective ways for people to work together to achieve their common goals.

In this post, I will discuss some of my experiences online collaboration, particularly as they relate to forums and chatrooms.  I will also talk briefly about my experiences using co-ment and Writeboard, which allow groups to work collaboratively on documents.

In one of my prior technical communication classes, my classmates and I were required to analyze the usability of the documentation for a thesis and dissertation template to be used by graduate students at my school.  After finishing the analysis, we then had to collectively write up our findings in a report suitable for submission to the Office of Graduate Studies.  Before the report could be assembled, however, we had to establish, among ourselves, who would be in charge of which parts of the document.  Prior to that, we had to determine how to divide up the labor so that each person got near-equal amounts of work.  That task was left up to me and two other classmates.

Because we were the only three people to participate in the first scheduled Wimba chat, we got to determine how the work was to be divided and which parts we, ourselves, wanted to be in charge of (which was a nice little perk for the three of us).  I should add that we used the audio-chat feature in Wimba to discuss the details of the project.  Wimba also has text-based chat and screen-sharing features.  Our professor had some difficulty getting the screen-sharing feature to work properly during a prior chat session, but the text-based chat option was used during later project chats when we had participants who did not have microphones that they could use with their computers.

At any rate, once we had determined the parts in which the work would be divided, we posted the list of available tasks in our class forum and let people post responses saying which part they wanted to be in charge of.  We also used our class form to post our completed individual work and to comment on the work posted by others.  Other Wimba chats were scheduled, as needed, to discuss our progress and air any concerns.

An interesting finding that we made toward the end of the collaboration process was that it is sometimes better to have two people, rather than one person, take on the role of "final editor."  While the one person we had in that role did do a good job, our professor reviewed our final product and made suggestions for edits in each part of the report.  If we had two people collaborate on the final editing process, perhaps we would have been able to reduce the number of edits that had to be made after the report was submitted to our professor.

Chatrooms, whether they support audio- or text-based chatting, may be the ideal way to brainstorm online.  During one of the weekly text-based chat sessions in my iPhone app-development course, I, along with my professor and a few of my classmates, talked about possible app ideas.  We were able to help each other refine our concepts and think of new ones, and it was, in my opinion, a very productive and fun hour.  I sincerely doubt that we would have had the insights we did if we had tried to have our discussion in a forum, since real-time and immediate dialogue is a crucial part of the brainstorming process.

As I mentioned previously, online forums can be effective collaboration tools.  They can be referenced at any point during a project, and they're a great way for team members to communicate when they can't all meet for a live chat.  Even outside the context of collaboration, a group's forum can allow members to learn from one another and even provide sparks of inspiration.  Getting another person's viewpoint on a topic can enable group members to see concepts in ways that they never would have otherwise, giving them the opportunity to have a more comprehensive view of a subject.

Similar in many ways to a forum is co-ment, a "Web-based text annotation" service that allows designated users to view a document, chose a passage to comment on, and write and respond to comments.  A screenshot of this process in action appears below:

(check out the article...noticing a theme here?)

I should add that I was given only "commenter" privileges for this particular document and that this document represents my only experience with the co-ment service.  Therefore, I cannot comment (no pun intended) directly on any other features or capabilities of the site.

My only real complaint about using co-ment.net is that it was difficult to read everyone's comments.  I kept having to click links like "minimize" and "read," and it was hard to keep track of which comments I had already read.  However, I liked that I could click on a highlighted passage and read the comments associated with it.

I also had the opportunity to try out Writeboard, which allows group members to edit a document, compare previous versions, and comment on the document and the changes they made to it.  Here's a look at what the editing process was like:

(looks pretty straightforward, right?...it was.)

I liked the simplicity of the editing process: there wasn't too much formatting code for me to worry about messing up, and the large editing screen gave me a pretty accurate idea of what the document would look like after I saved my changes.  I also thought the "Compare Versions" feature was very useful, and the comparisons were easy to interpret (with strikethroughs representing content that had been deleted, etc.).

One drawback of Writeboard is that it isn't "safe" for more than one person to edit the document at a time.  On two occasions, when I tried to edit the current version, I got a message saying "Hold On!  Someone's editing this Writeboard right now!" and telling me that it would be best if I waited to make my edits.  If each person were required to make extensive edits to a Writeboard document, it would probably be beneficial to set an editing schedule of sorts to prevent two or more people from trying to edit the document at once.  Of course, setting up such a schedule isn't the most convenient thing in the world.  Such are the trade-offs of online collaboration.

Do you have any experiences with online collaboration that were particularly positive or negative?  Have you collaborated in other platforms besides the ones mentioned here?  Comments are welcome. :-)

Twitter for Tots? A New Toy Lets Little Ones Tweet

 
Sometimes when I browse the Internet, I find an article that just makes me pause and say, "Wow."  Here's one from Wired.com called "Twoddler Toy Lets Toddlers Tweet."

In case you may be questioning the story's veracity, here's a screenshot of the official site for Twoddler:

According to this site, Twoddler was created by researchers at Hasselt University in Belgium as part of a course in mobile and pervasive computing. 

This excerpt from the Wired article explains the concept of the toy and how it translates kids' activities into tweets:

"Twoddler is a modified Fisher Price activity center, the kind that toddlers have tweaked and poked for what seems like generations. The difference is that this one has its activities monitored by a computer and the activities are translated into Tweets. The example uses a baby called Yorin, and if he spends, say, a few minutes playing with a picture of his mother, this Tweet will be forced on the world: '@mommy_yorin Yorin misses mommy and looks forward playing with her this evening.' Further, if he annoyingly bangs on the bell, over and over, for far too long, the computer will translate this to say 'Yorin is showing off his music skills with a new tune.'"

The video below, produced by the research team responsible for Twoddler's creation, shows the toy in action (although I will say that I was unable to find a version of this video that had audio included):

Twoddler: Twittering Toddlers from Bart Swennen on Vimeo.

While, as far as I can tell, this toy isn't yet available to the public, its ability to monitor and tweet the activities of toddlers can be used to serve several purposes:

a) to let parents monitor their childrent's activities and feel closer to their kids when separated from them

b) to get kids accustomed to the idea of social media/broadcasting their activities to others

c) to collect data on how kids are using the toy (e.g., which features are most frequently used, how often the toy is being played with, etc.)

Option A is probably the most innocuous, option B is kinda disturbing, and option C may just be the next evolution of consumer data collection.

What's your take on Twoddler?  Would you get one for your child?  Discuss.

Change is Good: How I've Revised My Blog Layout

 
As you can see, I've changed many of the attributes of my blog.  In this post, I will explain how and why I made these revisions.

First, let's look at how my blog looked before the changes were made.

When I first created this blog, I spent a considerable amount of time going through the templates and decided that the simplicity of Blogger's Minima template would allow the reader to focus on my content rather than extraneous graphics, and I thought that most of the other templates could be too easily identified as being Blogger templates.  Being the non-conformist that I am, not only did I want a template that didn't look so "ready-made," but I also wanted to change the default fonts and colors right away.  I thought that the titles and links should stand out, so I chose bold colors that would look particularly vibrant against the black background.  My original typeface choice was Trebuchet because it's clean and simple, and it also isn't as commonly used as typefaces like Times and Arial.

Then I looked at the possible edits that I could make from the "Page Elements" section of the "Layout" settings page in Blogger.  Here's how it looked after my changes:

 

I was thrilled to find a gadget that made a cloud out of my labels, and I thought that the "Search" functionality and "Subscription" buttons would increase the usability of my blog.  I also changed some of the titles of the sidebar gadgets in order to make them sound like something I might say (as opposed to generic titles), and I added a little blurb about me so that people have some idea who's writing these posts.

In addition, I moved the default location of the attribution, time posted, and labels for the posts to the bottom of the posts to the top.  This way, the reader will know, upfront, who wrote the post, when it was written, and the topics it covers. 

Next, I decided that something had to be done about the column width of my posts.  In my search for guidance on this matter, I found an article called "Displaying Text on the Web: Are Narrow Columns Better?" that detailed a study on people's preferences for things like column width and typeface.  The writers found that people strongly preferred 400pt. and 640pt. column widths and that there was no significant difference in preference/readability between the Times and Verdana typefaces.  With that information in mind, I changed the column width of my posts to 640pt. by changing the appropriate CSS settings.  The result is shown below.

After that, I decided to play around with my color scheme and add a header graphic to my blog:

 

In my Visual Design class, I learned that you should aim to have no more than two colors (aside from black and white) in your website design.  I had three: green, blue, and purple.  I thought that, while I liked this color combination, it would be better to eliminate the green because it didn't go as well with the other colors nearly as well as blue and purple looked together.

When I designed my header graphic, I wanted to convey the idea that traditional ideas about communication and text were being reevaluated in the context of New Media and the Internet.  To accomplish this goal, I took old-style text (similar to that created carefully by hand in the Middle Ages and Renaissance) and made it appear as if it was being viewed on a CRT monitor.  After I uploaded the image, I edited my CSS settings to remove the light gray border that formerly appeared around the blog's title.

Finally, I decided to change the default font in my blog to Times:

 

I changed my font to Times because I wanted to continue the theme of "the old being viewed in the context of the new."  Times has been a standard font in newspapers and magazines for decades, and I wanted to see how the "feel" of my content would change when presented in this typeface.  Right now, I think it helps to establish a sense of authority that helps to balance the light-hearted nature of many of my posts.  We'll see how I feel as time goes on.

As I learn more about HTML and CSS, I may test out my new skills by making some more changes to my blog's code.  Stay tuned!

What do you think of my changes?  Let me know!

Usability Crimes: Are You Guilty?

In my efforts to learn more about usability and web design, I found a blog post called "10 Usability Crimes You Really Shouldn't Commit."  I think the title is a bit redundant (Are there any crimes that really should be committed?  And are there any crimes that should kinda be committed?  Talk amongst yourselves.), but I thought it had some valuable information (along with an excellent use of illustrations).

Here are some points that I had never considered before:

Crime #6: A Background Image Without a Background Color

(screenshot from the article)

This one never came remotely near to crossing my mind.  However, I don't think it's as common as it once was to put text over a background image (and if I'm wrong about that, please correct me).  At any rate, color and its implications for readability is always important to keep in mind.

Crime #9: Telling People to "Click Here"

(screenshot from the article)

Here's the given description for this tip:

"The words click here have been around since the dawn of the Internet, but have been shunned aside in favour of more usable options. Using the words click here requires the user to read the whole sentence to find out what’s going to happen. Instead, describe what’s going to happen in the actual anchor link text."

What I find particularly interesting here is the idea that "click here" was, at one time, acceptable and commonplace on websites. Looking back, I realize that this claim is true, and it also occurs to me that I don't see it nearly as much as I used to. Perhaps this practice has fallen out of favor because we've become so accustomed to the idea of hyperlinks that we no longer need to be told to "click here"? Or is it because, as a society, we've lost patience for reading?

Crime #10: Using Justified Text

According to the article, "Justified text might look at neat and square to the eye, but it can generate some real readability problems, particularly for dyslexic users who can find it troublesome to identify words due to the uneven spacing of justified paragraphs."

Here's another one that I had never even considered, especially the part about dyslexia. However, justified text can be frequently found in printed texts, such as magazines and newspapers. Why is it acceptable to use this type of text alignment in print but not on the web? Could it be that web designers are more conscious of the possible needs of their audience than print publishers? And, if that's the case, does that mean that the Internet is a more democratic medium than print?

As always, feel free to share your thoughts on any of the questions that I have posed. Additionally, let me know how you feel about the various crimes listed in the article.

The Beginning of the End of Free Online News?

I don't know how widely this story is being circulated, but I do want to share this article about Google giving news outlets the opportunity to charge users for reading their stories online.

Basically, some news publishers are arguing that Google News is a "backdoor to subscription-protected sites," like the one maintained by The Wall Street Journal.

As the article explains, "You can read WSJ.com stories for free if you search for them on Google News and then click through. News Corp. The owner of the Wall Street Journal, knows this, but allows it because otherwise Google won’t index its site and then it will lose 25 percent of its traffic."

To appease the publishers, Google has agreed to let news publishers opt into a new program called First Click Free.  If publishers choose to participate in the program, they will be able to limit the number of times per day a user can access their stories through Google News.  After the publisher-determined limit has been reached, the user will be asked to pay for additional access.

The way I see it, there are two ways of looking at this situation, which I will describe later.  For now, read the article and Google's press release and make of them what you will.

Twittiquette: Is There Such a Thing?

Shhh...

Did you hear that?  That's the sound of Emily Post rolling over in her grave.

During my online travels, I came upon this article from The New York Times about how people are taking to Twitter to vent their frustrations, with some less-than-desirable results.  For example, "Mark Cuban, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks of the National Basketball Association, was fined $25,000 for criticizing a referee in a tweet after a game."  Now I didn't read the tweet in question, so I can't comment on whether or not such a large fine was warranted in that case.

However, I will share a tweet tweeted by Courtney Love aimed at designer Dawn Simorangkir, whom Love accused of being a liar and a thief:

“You will end up in a circle of corched eaeth hunted til your dead”

(I believe that was supposed to read, "You will end up in a circle of scorched earth, hunted until you're dead."  I wasted about ten seconds of my life trying to decipher that little gem...ten seconds I'm not getting back.  Thanks, Courtney.)

The lawsuit over these and other similar tweets has yet to be settled.

What really troubles me about the information presented in this article is the idea that people are using the 140-character limit on Twitter as an excuse for being overly blunt and downright insulting.

Here's a short excerpt from the article:

“It’s the same reason why schoolyard fights don’t start out with, ‘I have a real problem with the way you said something so let’s discuss it,’ ” said Josh Bernoff, a researcher and an author of “Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies.” “You get right to the punch in the nose. Twitter doesn’t allow room for reflection. It gets people to the barest emotion.”...

“The basic [libel and defamation] law[s] will be the same, but I would think that a defendant might argue that the language used on Twitter is understood to not be taken as seriously as is the case in other forms of communication,” said Mr. Abrams, who has represented The New York Times. “We will have to wait and see how judges and juries figure out how to deal with this.”

No room for reflection?  Not to be taken seriously?!  Sounds a lot like a cop-out to me.  The art of haiku is just one example of writers making the most use out of the amount of space allotted to them.  The problem here is that people too often use Twitter because they want to get a message across quickly, which often means that they don't think before they tweet.  They're looking for that instant "rush" that comes when they feel that they've successfully gained revenge on someone by defaming them in front of the entire world (or, at least, the people reading the tweets).  Now that this issue has been brought to the public's attention through articles like this one, maybe we can acknowledge this unfortunate reality and make sure that we're at least civil in our tweets (and in our online communications, in general).

Think those quotes were bad?  It gets worse.

Jeffrey Michael, an executive at Horizon Realty Group, is quoted as saying, "We as a society have to realize this type of behavior isn’t going to go away. We are not going to have civil conversation in all corners of the Internet. Part of that means we have to develop a thicker skin. We should not accept physical threats, of course. But what we recognize as upsetting and hurtful will diminish over time."

I think poor Emily just did a somersault.

As far as I'm concerned, an insult will always be an insult, regardless the medium used to express it.  While it's true that insults, themselves, may change over time, the sentiment behind them remains the same.  I seriously hope that he's wrong when he says that what we consider to be hurtful will change as time passes.  If he's right, then we're basically in for an anything-goes society were people fire insults at each other at will.

I'm sure I'll be revisiting this topic (or some related tangent), since people's lack of willingness to think before they post something doesn't seem to be going away anytime soon.

I'm interested to hear what you think about this topic.  Have you been the target of a tweet like those described above?  Or have you found yourself succumbing to the temptation to tweet in the heat of anger?

Viewing People Viewing Documents: Eye-Tracking and Usability

 
I just finished reading a very informative article, written by Lauren Cooke, about eye-tracking technologies and how they can be incorporated in usability studies.  It also details the patterns in which our eyes move when we read, whether the document in question is online or in print.

Eye-tracking data can be obtained through head-mounted or remote cameras.  In either case, the movement of the iris is recorded and subsequently analyzed using software that reveals the fixations (which "occur when the eye is focused on a particular point on a screen") and saccades (which happen when we "move the eye from one fixation to the next fixation") made by viewer.  The combination of fixations and saccades produce scanpaths that provide a more comprehensive picture of how that particular viewer went about visually analyzing the given document.  An example of what a typical scanpath of a printed text appears below.

(public-domain image, found here)

As Cooke explains, "Eye tracking as a methodology is based on Just and Carpenter's (1976) 'eye-mind' hypothesis: the location of a person's gaze directly corresponds to the most immediate thought in a person's mind."  Therefore, the data from eye-tracking studies can be applied in a variety of fields.  For example, such data has been obtained from pilots while they were flying planes, helping engineers to redesign cockpits to ensure maximum usability.  Studies are also being conducted to determine how people view PDA displays and other compact screens relative to how they go about visually analyzing material on standard computer screens.  Furthermore, eye-tracking data obtained from people reading printed documents reveal that font sizes smaller than 9 pts. and larger than 12 pts. tax the reader by degrading letter legibility and preventing words from being read as a whole entities, respectively.  People also tend to read at slower speeds, and temper their tendency to skip over words consisting of three letters or less, when reading complex material.

In addition to the information detailed above, eye-tracking data can, when combined with think-aloud studies, provide a great deal of insight into the problems people may experience when performing a particular task or looking at a given document.  People, in general, aren't very proficient at identifying and articulating their visual impressions, since people process visual data much quicker than they are able to consciously recognize and verbalize what they see.  Thus, eye-tracking and think-aloud data can be used to determine what areas of a document or interface are preventing them from accomplishing their goals.  Additionally, eye-tracking data can be used to determine people's general tendencies in their efforts to visually process the information that is in front of them.  For example, long paragraphs have been found to be less engaging than short ones, and people generally look at the top and bottom of a menu/list before looking at the middle portion.

If used properly, studies using eye-tracking technologies can provide valuable information for web and usability designers.  Data shows that people "do not necessarily follow the same scanpath for every type of Web site; instead, there appear to be universal scanpaths that people develop based on the function, genre, and design of a Web site."  Further research in this area may help designers to configure their sites to accommodate these various scanpaths.  Some of the findings detailed previously in the post can also be applied to web design, as can these conclusions drawn by researchers:

--People tend to read small type closely, but they're more likely to scan when reading text written in larger type.

--Readers often will not read the material that appears below an underlined headline.

--Eye movements are generally made in the shape of the letter "Z" when first looking at a website (i.e., starting at the top left-hand corner, then going to the top-right hand corner, etc.).  Readers are likely to make smaller "Z" patterns as they more closely examine the page after the initial scan.

--While objects that appear in isolation do draw attention, that attention is not sustained for as long as some designers may think.  Therefore, the isolated element that artists and designers want viewers to focus on should also be given another distinctive feature, like being drawn in a different color.

--People are more likely to read a story when they are given both its headline and summary than they are when presented with only its headline.

--Images 210 x 230 pixels or larger draw more attention than smaller images, and people are likely to click on images of the size 210 x 230 pixels.  This fact should be taken into consideration by web designers when creating icons and navigational links.

--If web designers want to provide related information (like a footnote or other explanatory note), they should place it near the text or image it is related to, instead of at the bottom of the screen.  The farther away viewers have to move their eyes in order to read the note, the less likely they are to read it. 

Does any of the data here (or presented in the article, if you've read it) surprise you?  Do you have any personal experience with eye-tracking and its applications?  Do share.

The Usability Wars: Mac vs. PC

"Mac or PC?" is possibly one of the most loaded questions you can ask of a techie.  My computing experience has largely been PC-driven...until recently.

I had the very good fortune of winning free tuition, through a sweepstakes that I found out about on Twitter (good things come to those who tweet!), for NJIT's iPhone Application Development course.  This victory necessitated the purchase of a Mac.  Being a student with limited income, I chose the cheapest Mac model that would get the app-development job done, namely the MacBook (with Mac OS X Snow Leopard pre-installed).  I was excited about getting the opportunity to play with/use the Mac OS, since I wanted to see, firsthand, what all the Mac-vs.-PC fuss was about and to make my own informed opinion.

There was definitely a learning curve for the first few days.  For example, I had to re-learn how to do basic things like "right click," copy and paste using keyboard shortcuts, take screenshots, and find a window among all those that were open (thank the Lord for the "expose" feature...ok, He probably didn't have much to do with that one, but you know what I mean.).  Particularly bothersome to me was the lack of a "maximize window" button at the top of my windows.  I thought, "If I can't even maximize a window easily, what hope is there for everything else I have to do on a computer?"

And then it came time to install some programs.

When I ran the installation for the iPhone SDK software, I was shocked at how smoothly the process went.  Basically all it asked me was, "Where do you want this?" And after I told it the installation location, *poof!* there it was.  Then when I installed other programs (for instance, some basics like Adobe Reader), sometimes all I had to do was click and drag an icon from one location to another.  When I got the confirmation that the program was installed, I didn't believe it.  I had to open up my Applications folder and see it for myself.  The confirmation message didn't lie.

I also noticed that, in general, things were more streamlined on the Mac: virtually no error messages, and no constant software updating required.  The two-finger scrolling feature became a favorite of mine (so much so that I would be disappointed to find it missing when shifting my focus back to my Vista-based laptop).  Startup and shutdown were quick, and graphics really were richer on a Mac display.  And you gotta love the little multicolored, pinwheely thing that replaces the cursor pointer when the computer is in the middle of processing something.  I'm also a sucker for bouncing icons at the bottom of my screen.

Seriously, though: it would seem that Mac has defeated the PC in this usability battle.

But, you can lose a battle and still win the war.

Word on street is that Windows 7 gives Mac a run for its money when it comes to usability.  I haven't installed it on my Windows laptop yet, since I have lots of stuff due in the coming weeks and don't want to run the risk of having to do a lot of extra, unforeseen downloading and updating when I really need to focus on my work.  But I'll make an assessment when the time comes.  I have to say that I do like little Kylie and her presentations in the Windows 7 commercials, and her ability to accomplish such artistic feats on a Windows 7-based machine does make a strong case for the OS's usability.





I'll post about this topic again when I get the chance to test out Windows 7.  Will I break little Kylie's heart and name Apple the victor in The Usability Wars?  Or will I, too, feel the irresistible urge to make slideshows praising the miracle that is Windows 7 (featuring kitties and bunnies, of course)?  We'll just have to wait and see.

In the meantime, have you tried Windows 7?  Are you a Mac or a PC?  Share your thoughts by leaving comments.

My Voyage of Self-Discovery using Google Sites

If you have a Google Account (and if you don't, you should consider getting one), you probably know that Google offers its users the opportunity to create sites (called Google Sites), for free, using its server space and web design tools.

Before I launch into my explanation about how much I learned about myself during the design process, as well as a description of my experience with Google Sites, I should really give some background information on why I designed the site the way I did.

I started out by taking this quiz on learning styles.  The quiz assesses you on four scales: active vs. reflective, sensing vs. intuitive, visual vs. verbal, and sequential vs. global.  Try taking the quiz and seeing what kind of results you get.

Here are my results:

My results make sense to me, especially when I consider them in combination with my Myers-Briggs type (INFP).  Perhaps I'll explore the connection between learning styles and Myers-Briggs types another time.

Based on my results, a person familiar with the scoring system (or someone who, at least, read this overview of the learning styles) would correctly say that I:

--  prefer to work alone, and I also like to take time to think about any topics presented and to process them sufficiently before taking action.

--  enjoy discovering connections between concepts and thinking about possibilities rather than merely learning facts.  I deal well with abstractions and appreciate innovation, and I don't like repetition or going through routine steps or calculations.

--  don't have any strong preference for visual presentations (videos, charts, illustrations, etc.) or verbal instruction (written or spoken words).  I appreciate both types of communication.

--  work best when I can see the "big picture" with regard to the topic at hand.  Then, I'm better able to understand the details and what those finer points do to "complete the picture."

Put it all together, and what does it spell?

I'm a very conceptual thinker who may not always pay attention to or appreciate the finer points of the topics presented.  I like to have time to absorb the material at hand before acting on it, and I also enjoy connecting concepts across disciplines and having the opportunity to structure my own "learning path."  Being exposed to the "big picture" before delving into a topic can be helpful, as well.

True, true.

So after I processed both the details and the overview of my learning style, I tried to figure out how a website designed specifically for someone like me would look.  I'd like to think that I did a pretty good job of not only coming up with a list of factors to consider, but also addressing those factors in the design of my new website, Before You Tweet…

Here's how I went about it.  Appropriately enough, I've included a screenshot illustrating each of these nine design factors.

-- To address my impatience with details, I put some quizzes on my site to compel the viewer to take some extra time to look over the finer points of the material covered on each quiz's reference page.

-- Reminders to attend to certain details, like saving one's changes on their Twitter Settings page, are also offered.  I find that I also benefit from receiving similar reminders in real life (more on that later).

-- I put important terms and main ideas in bold, allowing a global learner like me to quickly scan a page and get an overview of the major points covered on that particular page.   Bolding these items may also help the viewer to remember them, whether they be main ideas or details.

-- Because I have almost-equal preferences for visual and verbal presentations of information, I tried to include both in my site.  Illustrations are offered, along with written descriptions, for the step-by-step instructions, and videos are shown, where appropriate, as they can offer both visual and verbal representations of information.  Even if the video does not actually illustrate ideas through pictures, the audio portion of it does satisfy the word-related requirements of verbal learners.

-- Since global learners benefit from having the freedom to construct their own "learning path," I wanted to make sure that all subpages of the site were easily accessible from any page.  Thus, I put links to these pages in the left-hand sidebar of every page.

-- Global learners may also find it helpful to look at an overview of what they can expect to learn in a particular section.  Therefore, I made sure to include such overviews at the beginning of sections including multiple pages.  An overview of the entire site's contents is provided on the site's homepage.

-- To address the needs of reflective learners, I wanted to ensure that viewers did not feel rushed through the tutorial.  I encouraged them, at certain points, to take some time to play around/test out the featured aspects of Twitter before moving on.  At the same time, I tried to get viewers to see the benefits of looking at other sections, as well.  I also recognized that reflective learners prefer to "lurk before they leap" in online settings, since they like to think about things before speaking up or taking action.  Because of this, I reminded the audience that they can use Twitter as a strictly information-getting, rather than information-giving, resource.

-- On the "About This Site" page, I encouraged viewers to take notes, which help can help reflective learners to retain information by putting it in their own words.  In this way, they can take "ownership" of the material.

--  A right-hand sidebar, containing "Related Resources," is included on certain pages to address intuitive learners' need to imagine possibilities and discover relationships.  This sidebar can also be helpful for global learners, who appreciate seeing topics from different perspectives and discovering how they relate to things they are already familiar with.

To accommodate the thinking style of intuitive learners, I planned on having information about the theories behind a topic be linked to that topic's page but appear in a separate window.  That way, the supplemental information would be optional reading rather than part of the lesson, itself.  However, I decided not to implement this design factor in my site, since I thought that having extra information in both a sidebar and an extra window might result in "information overload" and, possibly, viewer confusion.  Furthermore, I felt that such an approach would be more appropriate for a site covering a broader topic, like social networking as a whole.

I also wanted to give users the opportunity to take notes directly on the site and save them in a private account, but Google Sites doesn't support this functionality.

While I was designing and creating the site, I, by necessity, had the results of my learning-style quiz very much in mind.  As I mentioned before, my results definitely made sense to me, and I related to the provided descriptions of my four scores.  However, these traits were never at the forefront of my thoughts, and I didn't have specific names for the ways in which I think, work, and learn.  As I reflect on my experience with discovering my learning style and designing my Google Site, I was reminded of the idea of "you have to name it to claim it," which basically means that once you have a name for some aspect of yourself or your life, you're in a better position to address it.    

As I worked on my site, I became more aware of how much my learning style affects how I complete tasks.  For example:

-- I took some time to really think about what I wanted to accomplish and how I was going to accomplish it, which is typical of a reflective learner.  I also made notes about possible layouts and things to include,  which helped me to map everything out before taking action.

-- I really enjoyed the process of looking for content for the "Related Resources" sidebars.  As I was adding those links to the site, I thought to myself, "I *would* actually like a site designed like this."

-- I had some frustrating experiences with retaining the changes I made on the "Manage site" page.  Why weren't the edits I made being reflected on my site?  Thankfully, it didn't take me too long to figure out that it was because I wasn't saving my changes before navigating away from each editing page.  I don't know what gave me the idea that I would just have to hit "Save changes" once before clicking "Return to site."  (Maybe it's because I'm a conceptual/global rather than detail-oriented thinker?)

-- I was also reminded of how helpful I've always found it to read the "In this section" overviews in my textbooks.  I just took it for granted that everyone benefited from such previews, but it's probably more accurate to say that some people find them more helpful than others.

Now that I have a greater awareness of my own personal way of going about things, I can do more to make greater use of my assets and compensate, where necessary.  I'll keep you posted on how these revelations affect how I go about doing the rest of my work.

I'm afraid Google Sites provided a few bumps in this road of self-discovery:

--  Finding an appropriate gadget for my site was harder than it should have been.  There are *so* many Twitter gadgets, and yet only a small percentage of them had any real practical use or relevance.  Does there really need to be a gadget for every celebrity (or "celebrity," as the case may be) with a Twitter account?  And every time I pulled the scroll bar down in hopes of revealing a useful gadget, the bar crept upward a little bit, indicating that there were still more gadgets to evaluate.  Google could have at least provided a count of how many gadgets matched my search criteria.  I know they can: they can count up how many millions of hits things get when someone does a search on Google's main page.

--  I had problems viewing my customized background image when I was logged in as the site's owner.  It's not that I couldn't see it: it's that I couldn't see it the way that I visitor would see it.  After I had finalized and uploaded my background, I panicked when I couldn't see the cute little birdie that was supposed to appear at the top of the page.  It turns out that the header that appears on the Editing pages encroaches on the background image, thus covering up the bird.  Much to my relief, when I selected "Preview page as user," the bird reappeared.

-- I had another problem with my background image.  When I tried to upload it, the "Custom" option for the background image was grayed out, making me think that I couldn't upload my own image when using the particular theme I had selected.  I then went through most of the other themes to see if the "Custom" option was available on them.  It wasn't.  I then went back to my original theme and hit the "Browse..." button.  It turns out that I could upload a background image under my original theme, after all.  Why would Google imply that that particular option wasn't available when it really was?

-- While creating quizzes was easier than I thought it would be in many ways, the directions for how to create one could have been more clearly written.  For instance, they should have covered the issue of permissions (i.e., how to allow or restrict access to the quiz), and they could have given the reader a more complete idea of what a "Form" is on a Google Spreadsheet.  I was left to figure out those details on my own.

-- I also didn't like how I couldn't change the font of the page header.  I could change the color and the header background, but not the lettering appearing in it.  Why?

I don't mean to trash Google Sites.  It's just that there are some frustrating aspects of using it.  But when I navigated through all the features and ways you can edit them, I thought it was pretty incredible that Google allows you to do all that without knowing any code whatsoever, and the WYSIWYG interface is incredibly helpful, as well.  I guess they do have to make some site features off-limits, since giving users any more power may compromise the security of Google's servers.

A few things that I particularly liked:

-- Editing the navigation sidebar was very simple.  I could indicate that a page was a subpage merely by pressing a few arrows on the "Configure Navigation" screen.

-- Google Sites has a special feature that makes it very easy to display YouTube videos on your site.  All you need is the code that appears next to the video.

-- Typing content on the pages was very easy, thanks to the word-processor-like interface.

-- Creating a new page for your site takes less than a minute, although I'm not quite sure why attachments and comments are enabled by default.

So that's my Google Sites story.  Be sure to check out the site and let me know what you think.  Or you can even Twitter about it.

Just What Is "New Media," Anyway?

 
"New Media" is a term that gets thrown around a lot these days.  But what exactly do we mean when we refer to "new media"?

Many definitions, each with a different focus, have been offered in recent years, and I'll summarize a few of them below (emphasis in all of the quotes below is mine):

EVERETT E. DENNIS & JAMES ASH
--"When the study was initiated the term was most commonly associated with New Media was 'convergence,' meaning the uniting of all forms of communication into one, as well as the integration of various media industries -- publishing, broadcasting, and telecommunication -- into a single amalgamated enterprise.  Thus New Media's definition was a blurred mix of media functions, content, and business arrangements marked by little agreement" (27).
--"When asked the most accurate way to describe their own New Media business, the executives preferred 'multi-media,' meaning a mix of cable, Internet, and broadcasting, rather than more singular users of the Internet" (28).
--"If anything, there was a reluctance to name specific individuals in a field 'where collaboration and even plagiarism is the rule,' as one respondent put it" (30).
--"Integration of useful content linked to specific audiences with great precision thanks to digitalization is a clear theme in New Media's future" (31).

KATHLEEN BLAKE YANCEY
--"immediate, direct, and substantive" (739)
--"More generally, however... the medium is suggestive rather than deterministic.  The virtues of the digital outlined here are more potential than realized, but this articulation demonstrates potential for a new identity, one not fully determined by medium, but possible within and through it" (753)

MARY E. HOCKS
--Interactive digital texts can blend words and visuals, talk and text, and authors and audiences in ways that are recognizably postmodern" (630).
--"help audiences take more conscious responsibility for making meaning out of the text.  Audiences can experience the pleasures of agency and an awareness of themselves as constructed identities in a heterogeneous medium.  How that agency gets played out, however, depends on the purpose and situation for the text in relation to the audience's need for linearity and other familiar forms" (633).
--"In a space where multifaceted identities can be constructed, experienced, and even performed, this experience of hybridity works to the audience's advantage by increasing the experience of pleasure through identification and multiplicity" (643).
--"The beauty of hypertext is…that it propels us from the straightened 'either/or' world that print has come to represent and into a universe where the 'and/and/and' is always possible" (653).

(will all of our desks look like this one day?  maybe so, at the rate New Media is growing.)

http://www.flickr.com/photos/4braham/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

It seems, then, that there are certain values inherent in New Media and its near-ubiquitous presence in our modern lives:

-- blending of separate "traditional" media, thus blurring the lines between them

-- audience segmentation

-- new definitions of authorship and intellectual property

-- immediacy and easy access

-- hybridity and multiplicity

-- a greater awareness of our own identities

I'm not sure I entirely agree with the last one.  I think many people are less self-aware in the New Media age because they use things like the Internet to disassociate and escape from their everyday lives.  There are also reports that people are more narcissistic than they were before the effects of the Internet permeated into many aspects of our existence.

However, I don't think all hope is lost here.  New Media can, as Hocks suggests, help us to become more aware of how we construct our identities, provided that we pay close attention to how and why we choose to use New Media.  Like anything else, New Media is what you make of it.

I look forward to learning more about New Media and its psychological ramifications, both through my own experiences and by reading the theories postulated by others.

As always, feel free to share you thoughts by posting a comment.

Works Cited:

Dennis, Everett E., and James Ash. “Towards a Taxonomy of New Media: Management Views of an Evolving Industry.” International Journal on Media Management 3.1 (2001): 26-32.

Hocks, Mary E. “Understanding Visual Rhetoric in Visual Writing Environments.” College Composition and Communication 54.4 (2003): 629-656.

Yancey, Kathleen Blake. “Postmodernism, Palimpsest, and Portfolios: Theoretical Issues in the Representation of Student Work.” College Composition and Communication 55.4 (2004): 738-761.

When Words Fail You: The Impact of Images

While much of the information we take in during the course of a day is driven by text (and, indeed, schools are placing more emphasis on their writing programs these days), it's important to also analyze how information can be conveyed through images.  Images can take the form of illustrations, photographs, icons, navigational aids/"wayfinders", symbols, charts, and graphs.  Images can be particularly useful from a usability standpoint, since, if presented and created properly, they can quickly communicate ideas and serve as supplement to, or even replace, words.  The power of images to take the place of words will be my focus for this particular blog post.  Specifically, I will give examples of effective uses of illustrations (both photographs and human-created images) and icons to convey ideas.

Illustrations

Illustrations, whether they're photographs or images created "by hand," can be an integral part of providing instruction.  They are often used to clarify or supplement the text-based directions included in the instructions.  Many "how-to" sites exist on the Web, but one that makes particularly effective use of photographic illustrations is Instructables.  According to the "About This Site" page, "Instructables is a web-based documentation platform where passionate people share what they do and how they do it, and learn from and collaborate with others."  As the screenshot below suggests, you can find instructions on how to create anything from Halloween costumes to computers.

(Happy Halloween, btw!  What are you going as?)

Here is an example of one of the instructions found on in the site.  It teaches you how to use a brown paper bag as wrapping paper.  Note the use of multiple images for this single step.

(Hooray for saving money!)

Illustrations can also be used in other contexts, and even if they serve as decoration, they can still be informative.  Consider this example, found on the "Customization" page for Mozilla Firefox.

(My computer wishes it could look like that.)

Note how a complete list of Firefox themes and extensions is not offered on this page.  That would probably be an overwhelming amount of information for the casual browser of the page.  Rather, the illustration of the computer give the viewer an idea of the kinds of features can can add to Firefox, while also serving as decoration for this particular page.  For example, the remote control coming out of the computer suggests that you can add multimedia functionality to Firefox, and the bullhorn is meant to convey the idea that you can enhance Firefox so that you can use it to receive important updates and alerts from your favorite sites.

Icons

Icons, like photographs and artistic illustrations, can be powerful communication tools.  Many designers have realized this, and, as a result, icons are found in just about every medium, including catalogs, websites, blogs (like this one!), computer desktops, and mobile phones.  If well designed with a target audience in mind, they can be particularly useful navigation aids.  Because they serve people from various cultural backgrounds, hospitals are one type of location that relies on icons to help patients and visitors make their way through often-confusing building layouts.

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation sponsored studies that resulted in the publication of a guidebook "designed for health care facilities and graphic designers interested in learning about and using newly developed health care symbols for wayfinding programs," which is also available online.  As mentioned in the document's executive summary, "Universal symbols can be flexible and simple to implement, yet

can be integrated into complex and far reaching sign, print, and internet programs."

Here are some images from the guidebook (page 1:6).  Can you guess what they stand for?

(OK: the last one's probably pretty easy.)

Here are the answers (from left to right):

-- Top Row: Surgery, Billing Department, Intensive Care Unit, Family Practice Clinic, Social Services

-- Second Row: Cardiology, Radiology, OB Clinic, Immunizations, Waiting Room

-- Third Row: Chapel, Ambulance Entrance, Pharmacy, Laboratory, Medical Records

-- Bottom Row: Pediatrics, Emergency

These 17 icons were "found to be 'most meaningful' by at least 88% of the tested multilingual population group"  (RJW 1:7).  During this same testing session, "participants walked one foot per second faster to find
their destination when guided by symbols than when guided by multilingual word signs" (RWJ 1:7).

I would be interested in hearing about any experiences you may have with images, be they positive or negative.  Did a particular image help you in a situation when you need a quick answer?  Or did an image confuse or mislead you at some point?

The Deliciousness of Social Bookmarking

As I talked about in my last post, social bookmarking, or the tagging and sharing of links among members of a network, has become a mainstream practice.  The other day, I finally succumbed to the trend and decided to give the four-little-square site (or, the site formerly known as del.icio.us) a try.

In keeping with the technical communication theme I seem to have going these days, I've decided to, at least for the foreseeable future, limit my bookmarks to those that pertain to the field in some way.  I hope that, if you ever decided to join my Delicious network, you would find my bookmarks to be of interest to you, as well.

If all goes well with the code, you should be able to see a link offering you the opportunity to join my network:


Because the tags applied by users are not standardized in any way and could very well be relevant only to the individuals who create them, one is left to wonder if folksonomy/social bookmarking is a "democratic taxonomy that allows the community to peer review the content of the Web" or "a disorganized collection of personal preferences."  I believe that it has the potential to be both: on a macro level, it's almost certainly the former, but on a micro level, it can indeed be the latter. 

Since every user gets a "homepage" listing all of his or her bookmarks and their tags, users can, if they so choose, create tags and categories that only make sense to them.  For example, if I want to keep track of all links relevant to a research paper I'm working on, I can tag those links "paper," regardless of whether or not those sites have any content directly related to "paper" as conceptualized by the rest of the world.  Therefore, if someone who didn't know what I was working on looked at my list of links and (micro-level) tags and didn't have any prior knowledge of how social bookmarking "works," that person may conclude that social bookmarks are "a disorganized collection of personal preferences."  However, as Prof. Ken Ronkowitz explains in a podcast called "Web 2.0 for Designers," the tags applied to the collective list of links on a social-bookmarking site are based on which tags are the most commonly used to describe those links.  Thus, the tags that would be relevant only to me would be "pushed to the bottom" and would not be reflected in the site's public (i.e., macro-level) tags.

Because there are no rules governing tags, a group/network could agree on a tag that would be used to designate links that are relevant to its members.  In this way, social bookmarking can be used to share links among colleagues or classmates.  This method of gathering and sharing links can be particularly useful when group members are collaborating on a project and will be using the same resources, and that usefulness is compounded when they are not working together in a single location.

A handout on social bookmarking (which, incidentally, is included in my list of Delicious bookmarks) published by the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative also points out that social bookmarking can, over time, transform how we think about and find information: "Tagging information resources with keywords has the potential to change how we store and find information. It may become less important to know and remember where information was found and more important to know how to retrieve it using a framework created by and shared with peers and colleagues. Social bookmarking simplifies the distribution of reference lists, bibliographies, papers, and other resources among peers or students."

That handout from EDUCAUSE is just one of the eight sites that I currently have bookmarked on Delicious.  Here's a screenshot showing you the rest:

 (have you been to any of these?)

The short descriptions that I wrote for each site describe why I think they might be relevant to those in the field of technical communication.  In particular, I wanted to include sites that provided a quick reference for certain topics, like usability and proposal writing, that may be germane to a professional technical communicator's work.  Through these sites, users can get the specific information they need about a topic, without having to delve deeply into it.  I also included several sites that can have very practical, immediate uses, particularly with regard to web design.  Web design can seem overwhelming to beginners and those who don't design or maintain sites on a regular basis, so I wanted to collect links that could make the process seem a little less daunting.

My favorite link so far has to be the Colormatch Remix Color Scheme Tool.  It takes away some of the mystery behind how colors work together, and it gives you the hex and RGB codes for the color you create/designate and some coordinating colors.  Give it a try!

Here's a sample color scheme:

(pretty cool, huh?)

If you come up with any cool color schemes (or find any other interesting technical communication sites), feel free to post them.