Meagan Timney (Blurb, Inc.)
As the publishing landscape stands at the precipice of change, authors are in a unique position to create not just “eBooks” or “screen-based books,” but holistic and integrated “digital reading experiences.” Building on Peter Meyers’ exploration of the “infinite canvas” in Breaking the Page and Craig Mod’s vision of “platforming books,” this session demonstrates why book creators (especially publishers and independent authors) need to integrate user-experience design principles into the creation of their digital publications, and how they can do so.
Publishing is dead, long live to software! Everything starts with a spark, and for Megan it’s about 2 tweets. If the future of publishing is the Internet and software, we must provide the reader a great UX – User Experience. A book must be findable, useable, meaningful, seamless and beautiful.
Meagan Timney’s though on publishing.
UX is a form of narrative: it has the setting, the plot, the rising action in the plot and the denouement after the climax of course. This is the classical scheme of a drama, hopefully all your readers will not die at the end of the process. It’s a whole journey, a cycle: check out Hero’s Journey on Google for slides and more.
The goal is to create an emotion with your users. It is more difficult those days with eBooks. The emotional connection is easier with paper: you feel it, you touch it and you can smell it. Lots of senses in action which you lose where you use a cold piece of metal. Every remembers when, as a kid you would hide under a comforter with your flash light…
An eBook can be unbound, more like a work in progress. Megan is speaking about hybrid publishing, in a similar way that we use it with ContentLC. I must however disagree on the non QR Code usage. Layar and Metaio uses augmented reality without markers, however, it requires special software.
A team is composed of one or several author (content creator), editor, graphic designer, producer, marketer, project manager… However the UX designer is more and more important. The UX designer should back up his knowledge by industry facts, trends, etc.
We should also keep in mind how our success can be measured. Define your success criteria early on.
One item which is really new to eBook is user testing. There are a lot of tools for doing that.
One of the challenges is to define a set of personas. Those personas will be the typical user & reader of your eBook. So, when in doubt, go back to your personas to ask yourself what would Joe do?
A demo or tutorial of your book or app is also very useful.