Podcast recap

My podcast experience was frustrating, but ultimately worthwhile. I have recorded voiceover for numerous projects, but have never dealt with the technical details of sound editing before. And, quite honestly, I was intimidated by the task. I started working in Garage Band, and was able to play with the settings and get a very decent recording of my script. But when I tried to stitch in music and publish it, everything sort of fell apart on me. After several fruitless hours and some really creative swearing, I gave up on Garage Band and moved to Camtasia.

I had never worked in Camtasia either, but my instructional designer used it recently to develop one of our training courses. So at least I had some guidance. As it turned out, I found it to be an easier, more intuitive program and didn't even need any help! But the quality of my audio was problematic, and I could not seem to clean it up with the editing tools. The other problem I had was in getting my music clips to fade out rather than to cut off abruptly. I could find no way to do that, nor could I find any mention of it in the help files. 

I am planning to send this podcast out as a test to some of our regional managers, to see how they receive it as a job aid. If the feedback is good, I have a whole series of other procedures I could summarize in similar fashion...almost creating a mini-library of procedure-related references. 

I have not been brave enough to tackle the addition of video and/or photographs. I am currently telling myself that my audience--sales reps--would benefit more from an audio-only version, since they are likely to be listening to it while driving. In reality, though, there are some topics in my proposed series that would benefit from imagery. At some point, when I am more comfortable with the technology, perhaps I will attempt it. 

Website Reviews

I have so much enjoyed looking at everyone's sites, and I am so impressed with you all! I could have gone on all day about what I liked, but I have tried to be reasonable. 

Chris

Things I like: Love the intro page and the invitation text below it. Also, the way you have "animated" the photographs on your About Me and Projects pages. I discovered the motion by accident and was totally delighted. 

Potential for improvement: I like your color scheme, but might like to see just a splash somewhere of a brighter contrast color--maybe a little more of the orange that your links change to when rolled over?

Jessica

Things I like: The open, personal tone of the writing, and the personal pictures are great--they engage me and make me feel connected to your story and invested in your success. I also really like the way you have incorporated so many external links into your narrative; that is a considerate way to allow the site visitor to draw on the resources you've found helpful.

Potential for improvement: The chart on your Progress page might be more informative if you attached some time frame to it (e.g, months or years along the x-axis). It might also be a good idea to have all your links to external pages open in separate windows, so the user never has to leave your site. Some of them already work that way, but others open directly in the same window as your page. 

Sharba

Things I like: I love so many of your design elements: the blue/black combination, the striking photograph, the reversed-out quotes against the black bar; and the size, colors, and font of your page headers. It is so clean, accessible and stylish. 

Potential for improvement: I like the "step into my shoes" graphic on the front page, but when I click it, it seems to just refresh the page. I would like to see it do something else; maybe allow me a peek inside your world through either video of photos. 

Dominic

Things I like: The way your navigation mimics a physical place is great. It makes me feel like I'm actually meeting a friend somewhere to catch up and hang out. I also really like your bold use of orange and blue; you have done a great job in carrying those colors through the site without having them become the least bit repetitive or overpowering. 

Potential for improvement: Your "Let's sit and chat" and "hobby lobby" pages have a different look and navigation than your other pages. It might be nice if you could bring the design of those pages into a bit closer alignment with the other pages, especially by including the top nav bar. From those pages, it took me some time to figure out how to get back to the other pages of your site. 

Adrian

Things  like: The movement on your site is so smooth and professional looking; I am especially impressed with how your Ashley photo gallery works. I kept spinning and spinning it! I also really like the glowing orange flower at the bottom right. It has just enough movement to be interesting, but not so much as to be distracting. 

Potential for improvement: Your font is a little too small for my middle-aged eyes; also, the header font on your Contact page appears to be different from your other font. 

Carie

Things I like: I think this site does such a good job of really anticipating and addressing the needs of its audience. I like the fact that it tells students right up front what its purpose is (You can use this site to access...). I also love that it's sort of a one-stop shop for all things ECS3390--including all those great resources you have compiled on the Resources page. 

Potential for improvement: If it's possible, it might be nice to convert your syllabus into html rather than (or maybe in addition to?) having it open as a pdf. That might make it more accessible, if students ever found themselves in a situation where downloading wasn't possible or practical. 

Ashley

Things I like: This is such a professional looking site, and the copy does a great job promoting your skills--the two descriptive words at the beginning of each copy block are especially strong. I also like the way you have put the Quick Facts in a consistent place on every page, but used different colors, which correlate to your home page.

Potential for improvement: For the sake of consistency, it might be a nice idea to make all the color-coded boxes on the home page the same size; right now, it looks like the User Documentation and Training boxes are a bit smaller than the other two. Also, because there is a lot of area at the top of your pages, the actual content starts pretty close to the bottom of the screen; you might consider making your white and blue bars at the very top a little narrower, so as to bring the content up further on the page.

Melody

Things I like: I really like the main image on your front page, with the unblurry you (and the other unblurry fellow) being clickable. I think you did a great job in finding (or composing) a photo that worked so well with the color and look of the TTU template. 

Potential for improvement: If possible, it might be nice to add some additional images to the interior pages--maybe some more pictures of you? I'm not sure how bound you are by the template, so this suggestion may not work. 

Rebecca

Things I like: What a great choice of background for a communication professional! And the colors are great. I also think you've done a terrific job with positioning the various elements of your pages; the asymmetrical effect works very well here. 

Potential for improvement: I cannot quite tell what you are doing in the photos on your Professional page and how they relate to the rest of the information on that page. It might be nice to include captions, or to make a tie-in somewhere on the page. 

Brett

Things I like: I am so blown away by your unbelievably cool phone that I hardly know what to say. It's just brilliant, and the ringtone really completes the effect. Additionally, your interior pages are very clean and well-balanced, and I like the use of orange and blue together. 

Potential for improvement: Right now, clicking on the phone opens pages in new windows; If possible, it might be better to have them open in the same window, so the site stays together. 

Monica

Things I like: This site is so beautifully designed and laid out! I love the colors, the brain, the background images... I like the way the design of your internal pages is different from your home page, but yet so well unified with it. I am also impressed with how cleanly you have handled the secondary navigation in your internal pages. 

Potential for improvement: You might consider changing the color and font of the links on your Writing page--perhaps to a nice burgundy, to match the rest of your site. Also, you might consider switching from justified text to ragged right, just to avoid some spacing issues. 

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. 

Week 4: Website example

I didn't have a page in mind for this week, so I spent some time looking through showcased sites on coolhomepages.com. (A word of warning: this site is way addictive). After driving myself crazy with choices, I finally settled on www.ricardoguerreiro.com as a model for the navigation and site organization (but thinking-clear.com for the graphic design). 

While I found the Ricardo Guerreiro site less visually appealing than some of the others I saw, its structure and presentation of information works well for what I hope to accomplish with my own homepage. I have decided to create a site that houses examples of the various training projects I have worked on in the last several years. The nature of these projects lends itself to the sort of categorization found on this page. 

One thing I especially liked about the front page here is the behavior of the rollovers/popups. We've all become accustomed to images that "do"something when you mouse over them -- e.g., mouse over a "photography" icon on an artist's site, and a sample photograph appears. On this site, though, a different image is revealed each time you mouse over an icon -- you can keep mousing over the same icon and get a different result each time (up to a point, obviously). For me, this was engaging; it make me play about on the home page for much longer than I typically would have. 

The home page also includes a brief message from the artist, speaking directly to the visitor. Additionally, there is a bio link, which leads to a brief blurb written presumably by the artist himself. I like the fact that the bio reads more like an introductory letter than ad copy. I think that approach makes sense for my site as well. 

The internal pages are very well laid out, with a grid of thumbnails at left and a blowup of the selected image at right. The cursor turns into a magnifying glass when you hover it over the blown-up image; clicking blows it up still further. My training pieces would work well like this -- although rather than just having them enlarged, I will probably endeavor to show more detail in some other way (perhaps a case study).

It is very easy to track where you within the site, and the navigation is extremely obvious and minimal--which is important to me. 

A couple of things about this site that I am on the fence about: 

1) The use of motion is perhaps overdone. Every time you go back to the home page, you have to wait for the icons to fly in. Also, there is some sort of rippling, sunlight-on-water effect on the right-hand side of the page that never stops; I find it distracting and unnecessary. 

2) The links page is mysterious to me. Is he linking to competing designers? Designers he is inspired by?  A bit of explanation would go a long way here. 

3) Some of the font is too small to comfortably read. Easy enough to fix that. 

And now, because it was so unbelievably hard for me to pick one URL, I have to offer this list of also-rans. I am limiting myself to five. 

burkedesign.ca -- a really charming and well-designed (albeit too long) introduction and nice presentation of information

thinking-clear.com -- gorgeous, gorgeous design but a bit abstract, navigationally speaking

holihandesign.net -- great use of color, movement and sound

mushroommultimedia.com -- good use of imagery to support the company name/identity, but way too fancy for me to think about imitating!

crowleywebb.com--very unique (but not totally effective) navigation, good design, snappy copy