Posts By: shirley

PublishingLab Meetup

By shirley, January 7, 2016

It’s 2016! Come see what PublishingLab has been up to at our MEETUP on Thurs, 28 Jan. We’ll also be introducing the Sausage Machine – an easier way to create hybrid publications. In Raadzaal room, Rhijnspoorplein 1, Benno Premsela Huis, 4th floor. PublishingLab nodigt je graag uit voor een update van de lopende projecten op donderdag 28 jan [...]

Introducing: the Sausage Machine

By shirley, January 4, 2016

Following up on the Hybrid Publishing Workflow, Gottfried Haider recently put together a small (but significant) piece of software for the PublishingLab, affectionately named The Sausage Machine. You can try it here: http://hpt.publishinglab.org/ See the source on github, including a Readme file Just what is the Sausage Machine? The Sausage Machine is an experimental system meant to facilitate [...]

Attempting to go Open Source with our Print Workflow

By shirley, December 10, 2015

While researching the challenges experienced in the hybrid publishing field, the issue of proprietary software and its limitations has cropped up from a few sources. So, I thought we could give Scribus (Open Source layout software) a test run using a chapter from the most recent Theory on Demand publication and see if it could [...]

Testing the Manual online

By shirley, November 30, 2015

The PublishingLab manual has made its way off a paper and on to the web. In order to see if this format would be useful to new interns, it needed testing. I used the User Checks method taught by Anoushka Scholten because checks are intended to be iterative, real users attempt real tasks with design, [...]

Fixed Layout ePubs: useful or backward?

By shirley, November 9, 2015

It seems there’s no perfect solution yet in the digital publishing realm for art publishers. It’s apparent that the reflowable ePub format does not suit visual publications very well, but is fixed layout ePub (FXL) the solution? What’s a fixed layout ePub? A fixed layout epub can be described as a hybrid of pdf & [...]

Usability Research: Testing Mobile

By shirley, October 30, 2015

On Thursday the PublishingLab visited the Usability Lab, in preparation for our interns conducting their own user tests on the App they’re developing for the UNStudio Project. Eyetracking One thing to be aware of with mobile testing is exporting video with visualisations for each ‘page’ seen by the viewer, otherwise the maps remain and can [...]

Lessons learned from PUSH UX Conference: from Medium to Mozilla

By shirley, October 26, 2015

This friday, I had the opportunity to attend PUSH Conference Munich and hear from two talented designers and user experience professionals. The first, Dustin Senos gave insights into what he’d learned from the process of designing for Medium. Jen Simmons finished the day with a call to action: it’s time to bring real art-direction to [...]

A Manual as a Living Document

By shirley, October 13, 2015

This post documents my attempt to turn UX principles on our current manual used with interns at the PublishingLab, luckily for me – I have a captive test-audience! The content is already 90% written, with an existing table of contents so I began with card sorting to test the intuitiveness of the sections. The first [...]
Sadly, it does not have anything to do writing your...

What’s writing got to do with it (UX design)?

By shirley, October 1, 2015

Sadly, it does not have anything to do writing your next novel. It does have to do with how writing helps users find their way around your design. Can someone get what they need from your site, book or App without frustration? You probably have some effective writing in your interface. This post will briefly [...]

Metadata Schmetadata: What’s it Good For?

By shirley, September 25, 2015

Metadata is literally data about data – this might sound dry but it has become a little more interesting over the years, and a little more important to get right. This post details the basics of what you need to know as an author or small publisher. Historically, you could find metadata hiding in a filing [...]