User Experience: What Works, and How?
The #eprdctn hour on Wednesday, February 21 was a one-week-late valentine to our readers: ebook developers talking about how we make the most user-friendly ebooks we can. There were lots of ideas and strategies.
It’s not for the feint of heart. – Colleen Cunningham Wnek
Superscripts
We started out with a discussion of superscripts. I mentioned that I try to keep them to regular text size so they are easily seen and tapped, particularly on small devices. Of course, the linked text references would be a color, and underlined. I’ve had two clients recently who initially balked at this strategy. I convinced one to go with my idea; the other refused.
Nick Barreto suggested brackets as an alternative:
I like using for that reason square brackets e.g. <a href="footnote-link">[1]</a>
— Nick Barreto (@nickbarreto) February 21, 2018
eBookNoir uses brackets, a larger size, and adds extra space (although he later mentioned having some pushback from clients on that extra space):
https://twitter.com/jetpack/status/966343976478494721And, from Kobo, Simon Collinson had a very interesting insight as to why, for Kobo delivery, usability wins out over client preferences:
Don't quote me on this, but I believe at Kobo we do a little CSS trickery to make superscripts closer in size to the body text. We also overlay endnotes in a preview dialogue box for ease of access. #eprdctn
(Note that Kobo recently struck a deal with Walmart to distribute within the US, so look for more and more US-based client awareness of and demand for Kobo compatibility.)
And what about non-numeric text references? Teresa Elsey of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt asks:
How about footnotes that have a sequence of markers in print (asterisk, dagger, double dagger ...)? We change to all asterisks in ebook, but then also group all the footnotes together, so it's not clear which is which ... #eprdctn
There was no consensus solution, other than to try to get editorial involved early in the publishing process to be aware of eventual ebook use, and plan accordingly so that print and digital align. That may mean going all numerical for references instead of a system of asterisks and daggers, which should be a straightforward task for a copy editor.
As for appearance, links must be visible for accessibility, which means to the vast majority of web and ebook readers a color and underlined. This may make a book with many text references and footnotes look like a hyperlink convention, but it is important to let readers know that the superscript is useful and usable.
On this and other questions about user experience, eBookNoir has the simplest solution:
https://twitter.com/jetpack/status/966344905474936832
Section Breaks
Or narrative pauses or time breaks or whatever you choose to call them: Simon Collinson brought this up:
This is the sort of thing I would very much like to see print typesetters stop doing (see also: using white space for section breaks) #eprdctn
I’ve always tried to convince editors and clients to use some kind of marker to indicate a pause. It’s common in print to add a few small bullets or an ornament when a break falls at the bottom of a page, just so the reader knows to breathe before entering a new timeframe at the top of the next page (a flush-left paragraph may not be enough to clue them in).
In an ebook that pause is very likely to fall at the bottom of a screen; we have no way of knowing how our readers are setting their preferences. So, to me, it’s a no-brainer to add something as an aid.
Client Education
Much of the discussion involved this tricky subject:
this sort of off-topic, but how do we all deal with clients (in-house and out) who don’t know what ebooks are? #eprdctn
After all, user experience is only obvious to users. And if authors and editors are unfamiliar with how ebooks work, how can we help them see our reasoning? Colleen Cunningham Wnek, an #eprdctn pioneer, suggested this:
In house, digital production started loading our ebooks onto our in-house ereaders and literally walking them down to show the editors how the ebooks functioned. Very hands-on and personal and it worked well. (Email could devolve into you need to do this or else...) #eprdctn
eBookNoir and Simon Collinson both recommended voice communication as well (phone call, in-person sit down), along with providing introductory articles and actual ebooks to read on ADE or other reading systems.
I have a questionnaire that I seldom use for new clients that includes the question: do you read ebooks? Have you ever read an ebook? It’s a good starting point. As eBookNoir says,
https://twitter.com/jetpack/status/966346610375610368
Hyphenation
Do you turn off hyphenation for text? For heads? The consensus is to turn off hyphens for heads. From Dave Cramer of the W3C CSS Working Group, among many other places:
We turn off for heads, leave unspecified everywhere else. #eprdctn
But then there’s this:
I SO prefer hyphenation off in heads, but we turned it back on when we realized sometimes "ACKNOWLEDGMENTS" was running off the page on phone-sized screen. #eprdctn
And a solution from Maggie Hunt from PenguinUSA:
Nooooooo, thats our classic problem word too. We also won't set heads above 2em now for that same reason (unless they are just a single digit etc). #eprdctn
Jiminy Panoz, currently developing Readium CSS:
FYI we had to word-wrap: break-word there, in Readium-css because well, quickly becomes an issue @ 200% font size with 2em headings. 😀
I mentioned changing Acknowledgments to Thanks (or even Thanks Y’All), reflecting this thought:
https://twitter.com/jetpack/status/966354222731194369
which brought this response:
But I like to preserve the author's creativity here -- I don't think they should accommodate us. (Not ebook-related, but we just got "Does your book subtitle really need to have double quotation marks in it? It's breaking our sales data processing"!)
Which brings us back to getting authors and editorial involved from the get-go of manuscript development, making them aware of how the eventual ebook edition will perform in reaction to decisions made early on.
Where to QA
The impetus for this #eprdctn hour was the superscript issue. Reviewing one of my books on an iPhone, I realized how difficult it was for me to hit the superscript and activate the link, unless I supersized the font, which is really makes the book unreadable. Colleen Wnek agrees:
Our phones became unofficial in-house ereaders. We'd think we'd be done with formatting, then put the ebook on our phone for QA and then ... ! Stopped turning off hyphenation, setting wide tables, justifying text. Sometimes I even asked editors to edit down long heads. #eprdctn
Reinforced by Aaron Troia:
I always forget about doing phone QA, most titles I work on are pretty basic for the most part but I really need to remember to throw the occasional complex book on a phone #eprdctn
I raised the question of knowing where a given book is likely to be read; will someone reading a book filled with complex tables, recipes, design elements move automatically to a larger device, just for ease of reading?
That's a question I really, really want the answer to! In the end we deferred to being cautious...but up to a point. We wouldn't overhaul a whole title that just wanted to be what it was (complex). But then again, we don't have that many complex titles. #eprdctn
Trust the Retailers?
We got off on a side-discussion of trusting what retailers will do with our books; how reliable are their reading systems from day to day as they seem to change at that pace?
https://twitter.com/jetpack/status/966357354404081664
And this from Keith Snyder (also having to do with client relations):
Yup. And we look stupid when we don't have definitive answers—which do occasionally exist, but are like high-energy particles in an accelerator. Wait, was that!?—oh, it's gone. #eprdctn
Photo Inserts
I make quite a number of books with photos presented in galleries, instead of being distributed throughout the print book. This allows faster book-making, for sure, and has printing ramifications. But why not slip that art into place in the ebook edition?
Another ebook UX issue: I just watched @eBookGoddess's talk from #ebookcraft 2017, and she asks "how come y'all keep the photo insert together in the ebook instead of moving the pictures where they belong?" #mindblown #eprdctn
One response:
IIRC one of the examples was from one of our sister publishers. I forwarded the issue and the response that I got was that editorial said there wasn't enough time. That sounds like a workflow issue. #eprdctn
I think it’s an editorial function and should be handled in manuscript. So does Laura Brady:
My take? If editorial is thinking about the ebook experience throughout – from acquisition to on-sale – then these kinds of questions are already taken care of. #eprdctn
Teresa Elsey asked about backlist titles, where someone may need to sit down and physically mark up a book. That’s tough, certainly, but not insurmountable:
editorial assistant! #eprdctn great way for entry level to learn book making, go into backlist and figure out structure and modify for e-version
Who Decides?
The main takeaway for me is to let the reading system and the user decide how to read the book. As Dave Cramer put it, addressing text alignment:
I think it's good for the reader to choose the alignment, for the most part. #eprdctn
And a concurring thought from Teresa Elsey:
Yes, I am coming around to a lot of things being decisions the e-reader and the human reader should get to make, even if they will make terrible choices. #eprdctn
It’s All About Accessibilty
If you think about it, everything we discussed in this hour is about making books usable — accessible — to as many readers as possible. Whether it’s seeing a link because it’s underlined to making that link big enough to actually tap and activate, we’re dealing with how users take advantage of the full potential of ebook reading.
Fortitude Is Needed
There are lots more UX questions to ask and delve into, but that was about all an hour could include. It was a lot of fun, with some good solutions offered. Particularly helpful to me were the prespectives of folks working in publishing houses, where a lot more feedback comes in from readers and solutions are actively sought.
And, lest we all forget, we deserve a pat on the back, because as Colleen Wnek said about #eprdctn:
It's not for the feint of heart lol
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