VII. Discussion

A. Motivate | B. Halt | C. Give | D. Inform | E. Suggest | F. Re-Envision

E. Suggest

Additionally, a type of people-based impact that emerged from the reflection narratives was “Suggest,” or suggesting new relationships among pieces already present within the design. These kinds of impacts were more oriented toward user experience of the overall layout rather than content-based changes, and were often suggested by colleagues and consultants. This impact speaks to the inventive power of a new perspective in evaluating the overall cohesion of a webtext’s pieces. As the generator of a webtext’s organizing logic, the composer knows precisely where everything is in the project and is focused on making rather than using it. Other individuals not immersed in the project, however, can provide fresh insights on what is working well and what is more challenging to engage. One example of a “Suggest”-type impact occurred in Draft DM4:

• Colleague | Suggest | Media

In this case, the pieces impacted were several images and a text block. In an informal peer review session, composition colleague Cate St. Pierre read through my draft and offered feedback. One of her suggestions was to provide labeled images of the focal materials in the introduction to make the references clearer for the readers. These images and labels were already present and distributed throughout the project, but in such a way that the relationship between them was not immediately apparent to someone not familiar with the project. Cate’s suggestion reminded me to make the image-label pairing clear from the very beginning of the project so that readers could engage the following discussion more easily—an important design insight for a designer who had already been immersed in the webtext for many months. This change may not have been reflected in the project’s explicit argument, but the shift in pieces did reflect a shift in implicit argument that placed greater emphasis on user experience.

Another example of a “Suggest”-type impact also emerged in Draft DM4:

• Consultant | Suggest | Text

In this case, the pieces impacted were several text passages (both major essay sections and popups). I brought the draft in to Ohio State’s writing center to request user testing and conceptual feedback. Dan, my consultant, mentioned that reading through the document in a web format was a challenging experience. He noted that many of the text passages throughout the document appeared very dense and intimidating, and suggested ways that I might break them down for easier reading. As a result of his suggestions, I broke several text-heavy pages into multiple linked pages that required little to no scrolling. I also significantly decreased line length in several popup sections for easier reading at a glance. Again, the shift in argument indicated by these changes was less significant for content but important for user experience, drawing on user feedback to make changes that implicitly valued reader engagement.

In these cases, “Suggest”-type impacts were enacted by a colleague and a consultant. These kinds of impacts seem appropriate to short-term interaction with the project; they are localized to focus on particular sections, and they stem from personal interaction with the webtext rather than disciplinarily specialized knowledge.³ They are a kind of impact oriented toward information organization, an important element of design across media that can be particularly challenging to address in multimodal scholarship (given the increase in possible communication channels). These new ideas for design tend to require a perspective from someone removed from the project who can offer feedback on an informed but unfamiliar user’s experience. Though not typical points of consideration for evaluating a scholarly work’s value, changes based on “Suggest”-type impacts highlight the importance of information accessibility in the design invention process. For someone intimately familiar with a webtext project’s design and implicit argument, other perspectives can be a significant part of the inventive juxtaposition process in order to make sure viewers can effectively engage the project as an integrated whole.