The reader journey - keeping things moving

I've been a bit quiet for the past couple of months (on here, at least), mostly because there's been quite a lot of life and other work happening (including a weekly blog for Westminster Business School).

But it's now January, and I'm back, with a new take on the HayleyWorld reader journey. In case you want to follow my progress, previous posts on this subject are 1. here, 2. here and 3. here

A productive meeting with development partner Michael Kowalski of Contentment, interviewing text mining expert Dr Stephan Ludwig  and reading James Pennebaker's The Secret Life of Pronouns: What Our Words Say About Us inspired me to

• redraw the journey algorithm
• change a couple of the forms I/William Hayley ask readers to complete

and

• thinking more deeply about how I frame the content from Hayley's Memoirs and other ego-documents.

Michael flagged two issues.

1. We were asking readers to choose their second batch of three subject areas (the first form currently gives them a choice of 11, the next one offers a choice of 8), before they'd exhausted the material from their first batch. This felt unintuitive and slightly confusing
2. There's nothing - aside from a changed chapter heading (they look like this in the current draft)  to indicate when a topic has been exhausted. 

As a result, the reader journey now has…

1. A contextual essay at the end of each topic. These will be in my voice rather than Hayley's, as they'll need to provide context. Their tone and content will need to complement, rather than repeat, the short marginalia commentaries. Thinking as I type, I'm wondering whether they might work even better as short video presentations. Will need to discuss that idea with Michael and my PhD supervisors (Profs Ian Gadd & Kate Pullinger), and, if it's a possible way ahead, create at least one
written and one filmed example over the next month or two, so that we can user-test both formats

This has also made me think about the number of subjects/chapters in the app. As you can see from the form below I've rounded the previous 11 up to 12 by adding sensibility. However, given the volume of work involved in creating essays/videos, I'm leaning towards rounding down to nineThis will involve merging 3 x 2 pairs of subjects, with love and marriage along with children and education being obvious start-points.

The latest iteration. There will be more…

2. A form with several free text fields. Aside from a couple of simple requests for basic info – for a reader's name, for instance – my plan was to avoid this, simply because developing a way of responding effectively to this mode of user input would be too big and complex a job.

Reading The Secret Life of Pronouns provoked a change of mind: we still won't be using readers' free text input to trigger a response from the HayleyWorld app. But we're aiming to use it to measure readers'engagement/involvement in two ways. Firstly, by the extent of their input – more words are likely to suggest higher level of engagement/involvement with the app, fewer, a lower level.

And, secondly, by using a tool – hopefully the one on The Secret Life of Pronouns website – to measure how far (if at all) a reader's use of function words (including pronouns, articles, prepositions, auxiliary words… there's a list on p22 of the book, and a brief explanation on the website homepage) mirrors Hayley's (or mine, when I'm writing as him).

Here's my first draft of this form (nb: in the app itself, there will be either nine or six options for the reader to choose from, as they will already have chosen their first three subjects)…

Um… I think that's more than enough for now. Thanks for reading. Next week I'm planning to review On Life-Writing edited by Zachary Leader.

How will it end? Boundedness, the satisfaction of completion, and never finishing the internet

After a short hiatus (I won't bore you with why*) I've had a chance to catch up with Michael Kowalski and review progress on the HayleyWorld zoeography app.

He's (hopefully) about to finish both implementing the algorithm and optimising the way the app works. And I'm going to continue writing commentaries, adding other content and thinking through the big question he asked me: How does it end?
 

When is a book a book?

Back in 2011 I interviewed Theodore Gray, author and co-founder of Touchpress, Wolfram Research and Wolfram Alpha for a feature in the Independent on Sunday about digital literature. Theo listed three characteristics that mark a book out as a book. If

"it’s bounded and user-paced and it’s narratively directed, then you can call it a book. Otherwise, it might be an encyclopaedia or it might be a website."

Theo Gray talking about books and apps back in 2011

By user-paced, he meant that it's not like a linear video,"that you are forced to watch at a certain rate. It’s a piece of text that you choose to read at whatever speed you want to read it at." He also states that the choice of navigation through the material should be entirely at the reader's discretion, while an author "takes you by the hand and shows you the things that [s/he thinks] you should read in a reasonable length of time, to get a good introduction, or a good overview, or a good in-depth analysis or whatever of this topic."

The boundedness of books is key to what I'm pondering in this post – and to how this digital biography of William Hayley will finish. Books, says Gray, "have a beginning and an ending and a discoverable way of knowing that you’ve read the whole thing. By which I mean that you can start, you can consume and finish it and say I’ve read this book.

This is typically not the case with websites. It’s an important and valuable and good thing about websites that they’re open-ended and they keep going. You don’t finish a website. You don’t finish the internet. That’s a wonderful thing. But it’s not a good thing in the case of a book. Because the valuable sense of accomplishment that you can have that I’ve read this book. And you can tell your friends. Part of it is the sense of satisfaction of completion."

Reading vs not reading endings

Tim Parks wrote a fab essay in The New York Review of Books on whether it's important for readers to read to the end of (good) books. One conclusion he reaches is

"even in these novels where plot is the central pleasure on offer, the end rarely gratifies, and if we like the book and recommend it to others, it is rarely for the end."

 And,

"it’s worth noting that stories were not always obliged to have an end, or to keep the same ending … It was only when myth became history, as it were, that we began to feel there should be just one “proper” version, and set about forgetting the alternatives."

A paradox?

Perhaps offering readers the opportunity to feel that "sense of satisfaction of completion" involves communicating the range of possible endings which would

a) explain my invarible dissatisfaction with forking path narrative
and
b) much more significantly, signal a paradox: to experience that a feeling of completeness, the work needs to we need a sense of incompleteness. Of potentials untapped, perspectives beyond the protagonists' storyworld…

 Tim Parks again:

"With novels, the endings I’m least disappointed with are those that encourage the reader to believe that the story might very easily have taken a completely different turn."

The conclusions Tim Parks draws concerning the relationships between reader, writer and text link neatly with a realisation Michael Kowalski's question provoked. The way we bound and/or end HayleyWorld needs to take into account not only how biographies finish, but also how, in general, relationships finish and, in particular, how William Hayley's key relationships finished.

How relationships end

While both his marriages ended badly, and his first love dumped him, most of Hayley's friendships either ended with the death of one party (his university friends), or with an illness that disabled communication – George Romney and William Cowper. A few others petered out over time. Only one or two – that with George Steevens, for example – terminated in high dudgeon. His professional relationships tended to follow similar patterns. Even though William Blake's three-year stay in Felpham ended in a colossal row, later communciations between the two men, if not overly intimate are courteous and amicable.

This also raises the question of how I want HayleyWorld's audience to feel when they finish – or finish with – the app. Overall, I'm aiming for engaged, amused and informed. But do I want them to feel about William Hayley and other key players in his story as I feel about them? Or do I want them to make up their own minds? What do I feel about William Hayley and co?

And how do I ensure that these questions – and all the others that pop up when I'm thinking about relationships between protagonists, narrative journeys and the user experience – inform both content and technical development rather than simply running along on a parallel track…


* oh, all right: work, ill teenager, divorce and building work demanding the Movement of Many Things. All on-going (although most of the Things have now been Appropriately Moved)…

So, what's new about it?

Although reading a book about someone can be an excellent way of getting to know about them, it’s not like getting to know them. The ways we impart and receive information during interpersonal contact are radically different from the ways we absorb stories from books. The order of information sharing, what is given and withheld at any particular moment, how much the sharer reveals about any particular event, what happened, how they feel, their degree of honesty, and so on, vary, depending on all kinds of factors, including why and how people meet, how much time they spend together, how much they like each other – and in which kind of way. If people were books, they would be a different book for each individual they formed a relationship with.

And that's how I want to make HayleyWorld. As a different experience for every reader, based on their individual interests and interactions with the app. This means that I need to break down each story/event in William Hayley's life into a "nugget" of information, write each significant nugget in tow or three ways, with varying levels of detail and emotional content, so that Hayley "tells you" the story in a way that's appropriate to how well you've got to know each other.

So, yes, readers will be asked to enter some information about themselves. Their journey through William Hayley's life and storyworld will be determined partly by their choices and partly by other triggers including chronological date, the amount of time they've spent in his company and what William Hayley "wants" to tell them about…

Making that work isn't going to be easy. There are certain aspects of the process – particularly ensuring that the various nuggets link up every which way into different, but equally satisfying, narratives – that will be exceptionally challenging

HayleyWorld will be built as an app for tablets and smartphones, using Padify, and – thanks to Michael Kowalski – with help from Contentment's team of developers.