Clarity Strategic^TM

Designing For Use
Including features people need and don't know it
Dr. Ron Graham
Stark State University
Fall 2012

Abstract

This course is about design considerations for the engineer. In our profession, we often focus on the thing an object (e.g. machine, structure, program) is supposed to do, rather than the wider needs of an end user.

• How do I make it work?
• How do I know it's working?
• What do I do if it's not?
• How do I make it work better?

Last year, paper.li was noticed by Twitter users, and became a big hit! You probably know paper.li allows you to create a "newspaper" based on the content of tweets. They're by no means the only such service, but I'm only one man and, well, I wanted to make content digests and had to choose just one service.

The contributions don't even have to come just from people who follow you, or people you've been following. I'd be shocked if most people who create a paper use as their primary source of contributors anything other than a Twitter List – with tweets from appropriate hashtags as well. That's what I use. I have four papers:

• The #Akron Daily
• The 24-Hour Bully Stake-Out Times
• #GEEK and Proud!
• The Indie #ProWrestling Herald (comes out only on Fridays)

No, I'm not saying give the authors as gifts. They won't fit in your online shopping cart anyway. But authors DO make great #GEEK (== "gaining ever-expanding knowledge") gifts.

If it's on this list, I recommend it with my heart. Although! There are a couple I have yet to read. In those cases I am going by my personal interest in the author(s). They've never let me down, and they won't you either.

I have conducted a couple of interviews on Twitter in the past, but the information in those has already been reprocessed into article form, so I am writing here about a proposal I made to interview the Downtown Akron Partnership on Twitter about First Night Akron 2012. And to say a few words about what others are doing. I argue that interviewing via Twitter is easy, and reclaiming the tweets for other purposes (e.g. Web site) is also easy, thus giving the interview info two or three times the exposure it would get if you, say, conducted your interview over the phone.

Jay Asher (@jayasherguy) and Carolyn Mackler (@carolynmackler), co-authors of The Future of Us, conducted a joint interview on Twitter a week ago, and you can see what they had to say via hashtag #futureofus. (Asher is also known as the author of Thirteen Reasons Why.) In their case, not many tweets were posted. My guess is that most of their (young adult) audience didn't use the hashtag.