Boxes and Arrows: Comments by Martin Bulmer

Martin Bulmer — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 11:19:55 GMT

For the fastest to live, complex site I designed, ALL of the content was in the wireframes. the client, an educational expert, dictated the entire thing in one afternoon, straight into Visio. I went on holiday to NZ (where I now live) came back and the designers and developers had built the entire site. They knew exactly what they were working with, had to accomodate for and could not ponce off in designer/developer noodling. Brilliant. If only all clients were so amenable and available.

Martin Bulmer — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 23:39:04 GMT

All I can say is that the comment system of B+A sure discourages reading from screen.
Yes we’ll be reading from paper. if for no other reason than it’ll still be around; there’s just too much value in them thar pages.
BUT paper, generally, does not run out of batteries, can respond well to serious abuse (being dropped, wetted, folded, torn, stuck back together, written on and thumbed repeatedly) and has a number of useful cues and affordances. You can tell how far through the book you are; you can use this method to estimate your position should you drop the bookmark. you can scan the pages quickly because you remember quite a lot about the shape of paragraphs. Being reflective rather than luminant it is more often than not easer on the eye. Most importantly, these sorts of cues don’t have to be taught explicitly; they come as baggage with the teaching of reading.

I don’t know about you, but if I switch off my concious focus when reading on screen I have to go back and read again; it seems to require ‘active reading’. Reading a book on the other hand is more often refered to as ‘relaxing’... I’d be very surprised if different part of the brain didn’t light up

Martin Bulmer — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 12:12:34 GMT

This is fast becoming a two person discussion…..Screens are on the whole, terrible resolution. 72 dpi instead of 600dpi or higher. I’d like to experience some of the new hi res hi contrast tablets. I conducted research on reading from screen vs reading from paper. The results were inconclusive because my experimental design was terrible (I was young what can I say). Nevertheless the literature was pretty conclusive 20 years ago, and the common perspective is not any different. Recently saw a rubbish ‘raah raah’ video for social media that was packed full of ‘statistics have gone up by 150% since Facebook was invented’-type non facts. There was something in there that suggested that a high percentage of books sold on Amazon are Kindle books. Would like to see that substantiated.