Reflecting on e-text and e-design

As I was reading the article "Hypertext and the Changing Roles of Readers" by Nancy Patterson for class this week I got to thinking about electronic text in general. There are some things which I receive electronically which I will almost always print and then read the printed version and yet at other times I read quite lengthy texts online. Why is it that I exhibit this behavior? It doesn't seem to just be me either as many of my colleagues and students act in similar ways.

Take for example the articles we read for class this week, I printed all of them off before reading them. Here there's at least one simple explanation. Two of the files, distributed in PDF format, were originally clearly designed for paper reading. Most noticeably they contained text in columns. I don't know about you but when I see text in columns it's screaming to be printed. It's far too easy to loose your place (and train of thought) in the text when you spend all your time scrolling up and down the page on the computer. In fact the entire idea of pages doesn't make sense for electronic texts. Instead it should be about logical sections and not something imposed by the medium.

While that an explain why I printed the two PDF files, what about the two page MS-Word document? Surely I could have read that online. Well, yes, I suppose I could have done that, especially with such a short document (more on that later) but in some cases it's about formatting as well. For me to want to sit and read something at the computer it has to be interesting, and not just in content, it must be visually pleasing as well. Here's another place that electronic texts tend to fall apart. A lot of websites (particularly in academia (that's you EbscoHost)) simply dump quantities of text to the screen. No real formatting, no bold headings or dropcaps, no pictures, nothing but the text. This is not whatsoever conducive to reading online as without pages or columns (as with paper documents) to break up the text (see above) and often with poor font choices it's very uninteresting and easy to get lost. This lack of visual interest is why I rarely read word processor documents in their entirety on a computer.

So what do I read on the computer? I can read news stories (lots of them), threaded discussions, web articles, Wikipedia, blogs, special features, emails and lots of generic website content for hours on end. Some trends are easy to pick out such as relatively short things such as news stories, threaded discussions, emails and blog entries tend to be fairly short. Short things are easier to read on computers. At the same time I can read web articles and sites which would be pages and pages long if I printed them out. Most of the longer things I read show some good design sense. For example, they may break things up into sections and delineate things by using various fonts and styles. They often make good use of graphics and photos and have a pleasing layout.

It's often said that you should not judge a book by it's cover and to some extent that's true. It's not all about design, content must exist as well, but if you want people to read something it's long been acknowledged by graphic designers (who are responsible for much of the good print layout you see) that making it accessible to the reader encourages them to stay with it. Similarly, I would argue that good design goes a long way towards making electronic texts more accessible but at the same time we can't simply take print design methods (columns and pages for example) and translate them into electronic text design. It pays to be conscious of the decisions you make regarding design and dissemination of electronic text if you want people to read it.