Early last semester, we had a conversation in my Clio Wired 2 course about building websites to meet user needs, and the strategies to take to ensure our websites were usable. Most of our reading focused on strategies for building commercial websites, but unlike building websites for business, digital humanities projects have to walk a fine line between satisfying user needs/wants while providing information/services we think users ‘should’ need/want. Its a conversation that has been in the back of my mind for a while now, and this post is an attempt to articulate some of those thoughts.

When a history professor is researching and writing a book, for example, she isn’t necessarily concerned with what her “users” would like to read about. Maybe some are, but most academics are concerned less with meeting audience needs than they are with teaching the audience something new. In fact, they see one of their goals as contributing new knowledge, knowledge those academics think will be useful to their profession as a whole. They don’t necessarily write monographs to make it easier for, say, K-12 teachers to use them in class. In a lot of ways, usability is prescribed in the format of the academic monograph: table of contents, chapter headings, page numbers, paragraphs, footnotes, the occasional figure or appendix. And, if I may speculate, this prescribed format may undermines the need for the creators of academic scholarship to really think about usability.

Most websites, however, are built with user needs primarily in mind, at least most commerce-based websites. Business do focus-group testing, user testing, and marketing to try to meet particular user needs. In that sense, websites try to provide something users want, without uses have to think about how to get what they want. In fact, one of the leading web usability book in print is titled “Don’t Make me Think!” and argues that websites should strive to create interfaces and experience that require little thought to use.

Digital humanities websites, it seems, have to walk a fine line between two very different goals: On the one hand, we do want to provide information and tool that we, as experts, think the audience should use and need. On the other, we can’t simply offer it and expect that our audience will find it valuable. The trick with digital humanities projects, it seems, is to encourage users to think about specific things, think we want them to think about, while providing tools and methods for doing that kind of thinking in an unencumbered, clumsy web interface.

In Train of Thoughts, John Lenker argues there are three parts to providing a effective experience on the Web:

1. Entice – Get the audience interested in your topic
2. Inform – Provide some meaningful information to the audience; Educate audience about a particular topic.
3. Invoke – Encourage a response from the audience, ensure that the information you’ve given them can be put into meaningful action somehow.

Traditional academic scholarship is almost exclusively focused on the second part: Inform. It may dabble in the Entice part, with catchy titles or discussions at book clubs or on the web. And while scholars certainly want to invoke a response from colleagues, the product itself doesn’t encourage a variety of responses. Digital humanities, though, has the means of combining all three into a meaningful, usable experience. In fact, I would argue that any work in the digital humanities needs to accomplish all three to be effective.