Thinking about podcasts

Because I am truly a podcast novice, I spent some time looking online for best practices. Below are some of the more interesting points I found, in case they are useful for anyone else:

• Unless visuals are necessary or valuable for the message, they should be avoided, becase many listeners like to be able to do other things (e.g., driving, exercising, etc.) while listening.

• Communication goals, message strategy and target audience should inform the length of the podcast.

• Sound quality should be as high as possible; static and background noise is very noticeable to listeners using earbuds. 

• Practice several times to get comfortable with the topic, the microphone, etc. 

• Maintain a consistent distance between your mouth and the microphone.

• Edit, edit, edit the audio file to get all the pauses and ums out

I also found this quote in a podcasting guidance document from the CDC, which addresses some of what we discussed in last week's MOO, regarding listener engagement and call to action. 

"Despite its classification as a Web 2.0 technology, podcasting still retains some 1.0 characteristics. For instance, podcast messages are crafted, produced, and broadcast with little to no audience participation or personalization inherent in many other Web. 2.0 technologies. One way to increase audience engagement is to actively solicit audience participation and use audience feedback. Methods include answering audience emails, receiving and recording audience phone calls, receiving questions and comments from listeners in audio files, etc."

A Couple Irritating Things I Noticed

After spending some time sampling, it became very obvious that podcasts are just like websites: they cover every imaginable topic in every imaginable form, and with great variation in quality and professionalism. I developed some new podcast pet peeves, and here they are:

• Overly-long introductions -- most podcasts opened with a little snippet of music and and a canned voiceover introduction. A surprising number of them were WAY too long

• Robotic speaking -- spend about three minutes listening to the podcasts on blog.salesopedia.com, and you will be driven completely insane. 

• Inane banter -- probably needs no further explanation

Podcasts that I Liked

I searched primarily for ways to use podcasting to teach sales techniques, product features, and terminology. Here are two that I enjoyed. 

• askasalesquestion.com/podcast -- each podcast covers one sales question, with the whole question itself being the title of the file (which was very helpful). Audio quality is excellent, and the speakers cover the material very concisely, but don't sound robotic.  
  
• Princeton Review Vocabulary Minute -- Aimed at high school students, these are charming, somewhat addictive little songs that teach new vocabulary words. I was especially fond of Party, Hollywood Girls, and Quiescent Night

Action and thought

If I am interpreting correctly, what Meadows is saying with his "action is the highest form of thought" is that you learn and experience more by doing than by reading, watching, analyzing, etc. When I read this, it made me think of Bloom's famous taxonomy of learning objectives. Actually, Bloom put action (synthesis, in his terminology) as the next-to-highest level, with evaluation being the very highest. In the early 2000s, however, his version was revised to reflect newer findings in learning. In the revised version, action (creation, generation, production) takes the top spot. Although the taxonomy is talking about learning objectives (e.g, outcomes) and Meadows is talking about the thinking/doing/learning experience itself, the two viewpoints align nicely. 

For several years, I have been developing training programs--for my current employer and for previous clients. But prior to that I was an old-fashioned freelance writer, for traditional print vehicles, in which reader interaction was little, if ever, given thought. Partly because of my print background and partly because I tend to be somewhat didactic by nature, I am always struggling in my training development to relinquish control to the learner. When I start a new project, my brain inevitably goes down a very traditional path: a course created like a book, with a chapter-like structure in which the learner is forced along sequentially (didn't the book refer to this as a string-of-pearls design?). 

Moreover, I find myself wanting to tell, tell, tell the learner things. It's a challenge for me to step back and let him or her do, even though I know and believe that doing is the most effective way of learning. Rather than give the learner a list of requirements and steps for designing a product label, for example, it is much more effective to present him with an immersive non-directed case study in which he actually seeks out the necessary requirements, designs a label, and receives meaningful feedback on the design. But this is unsettling for me because learners are unpredictable and untrustworthy beings. What if they don't bother to seek out the necessary information? What if they manage to get through the case study without actually learning anything? I fight the same internal battle with course interface design; it's hard for me to design a non-sequential course, where the learner is completely at liberty to explore (or not explore).

I am rambling, I realize, but I'm coming back around to the original idea: that action is the highest form of thought. From the learner's/student's perspective, I think it means much what I've already discussed: that no amount of looking, reading, hearing, or thinking about something compares to actually doing it. This is why simulators are such effective training tools and why there is such a high rate of transfer in simulator-learned behaviors into real-world situations. From the author/designer's perspective, it means that we have to be constantly looking for ways to give the user real experiences of doing--to build in autonomy and realistic results wherever possible. Again, I write mostly from a training viewpoint, because that's where my focus is, but the interviews in Meadows make it clear that the concept is an important one across all interactive disciplines. 

Progress on Site Design

I've spent half the day working on my site, but can't quite get satisfied with how it looks. I keep coming back to Meadows' four factors that affect functionality of graphic design (legibility, contrast, color and movement) and asking myself if I am using them appropriately. I've never had much of a eye for design, and I struggle with the smallest of decisions: How much contrast in font size between the main head and the secondary? Should my menu bar bleed off the screen or should I leave white space around it? Does reversed out text add impact, or just make it hard to read? Does the movement I'm using actually direct the viewer's eye or just drive him/her batty? And all this before I even tackle the technical hurdle of actually publishing the site. Help!

What you see above is the home page after all the buttons have dropped into place (they fall in from the, sequentially left to right), but before they have been rolled over. Below is a screen grab of what happens when a button is rolled over. I want it to be clean, but I'm afraid I may have crossed over from clean into boring. 

Nor am I exactly happy with my interior pages. Below is a shot of the one I have most fully built out. Each of the thumbnails in the colored bar is clickable; the content below the colored bar changes accordingly, and the three thumbnails below the text all pop up to larger views when rolled over. In designing these interior pages, I am trying to think in terms of telescoping levels of information -- that is, the toggling between macroscopic and microscopic views that Meadows discusses.

My thought is that the images in the blue bar offer one subdivision of information (in this case, more information about a specific web-course); once the viewer has selected a course from that bar, he or she then gets another subdivision in the form of the additional thumbnails along the bottom, specific to the course under examination. But I feel like the bottom part of the screen and the the top half are discordant rather than cohesive. Maybe I need some sort of visual element to tie the course-specific information (bottom half) to the color-blocked navigation bars (top half). Or maybe I need to have the course-specific information appear in a popup window rather than in the main screen, since the main screen starts to get SO busy.

So much to think about!

Week 5: Three Principles of Interactivity

I liked Meadows' principles of interactivity the first time I read them, but enjoyed them even more this week, now that I am further along in developing the plan for my own site. 

Input/Output

In the most basic terms, this principle is at play from the moment a user opens a website. Typing in a URL (input) opens the site's home page (output). From there, even on the most basic site, the user is presented with additional opportunities for input--even if those options are simple hypertext links to other pages. On more sophisticated sites, the opportunities for input grow more sophisticated; the user can click on a thumbnail image to see a larger view; mouse over a menu button for an explanation of where the button leads; launch a video or audio track; choose an avatar; or log in to access locked content. Any one of these input actions, plus who knows how many others, meet the criteria outlined by Meadows: 1) the user can tell what change he or she is affecting; and 2) the user can control the input. 

A couple of other points Meadows makes about input and output are that the interactivity cycle's ability to add information is what defines its quality AND that the input should facilitate new input. These are key points, I think, for good design. We've probably all seen sites with interactive features that really seemed to serve no purpose other than sparkle -- e.g., images that spin, flip or glow when moused over. As I work on my own site and the artist site redesign, it will be important for me to remember that any interactivity I include needs to lead the user further along the path toward immersion. 

Inside/Outside

I must admit that I struggle a bit with this principle. If I am understanding it correctly, the most effective interactivity marries up the user's internal world with his or her external one. If so, then I can think of no better example of this that the MMORPGs (massively multiplayer online role playing games) that my kids spend so much time engaged in. I understand why that would be effective, but I don't quite know how to go about applying it. 

Open/Closed

I'm assuming that the vast majority of sites on the web would fall into the closed category rather than the open. Gaming sites, auction sites, MMORPGs and social sites like Myspace and Facebook seem like the most obvious example of open systems, but another category might be the online dating services that use user-provided information to generate likely matches.

It also appears to me that many shopping sites have begun to integrate elements of indeterminancy as well. Specifically, I am thinking of Amazon's recommendations function, in which the site suggests books, music, etc. that the user might be interested in, based on his or her purchasing and browsing patterns (or, for those who take the time, the ratings they assign to books they have already read).  Other shopping sites offer similar dynamic features: deals of the day, lists of top selling items, and notes telling you that "shoppers who bought this item also bought _______" or Perhaps I am naive or gullible, but I actually pay attention to all those things!

Because open systems are so complicated, I don't know how to incorporate this principle into my own sites. The only way I can imagine doing so would be to include a blog, which could theoretically spur the indeterminancy of user feedback and dialogue.