this post features adventure, experience design, and headline etiquette.

I’m looking forward to David Lee King’s upcoming book on experience design and creating user-centered websites (thanks, Lia). His chapter on the subject in Information Tomorrow was excellent, and from what I understand this book takes the same practical and readable approach.

One aspect of experience/instructional design that I find compelling is its crossover potential – David’s book is obviously not intended for a strictly librarian audience. I love it when librarians bring their insight into the user experience to benefit other fields, and this is an excellent example of the type of work that puts what we do best in better perspective. On the flip side, librarians can and should benefit from the number of fields that have developed effective ways to educate and inform. I’m tackling a design-oriented book project this year that translates ideas in instructional/experience design and visual literacy to education in a library context, which I have found to be of great help in creating a variety of effective learning experiences from classroom instruction to staff training to web tutorials and so on.

As a consummate writer of opaque blog post titles, this article gave me a moment’s pause – it’s interesting to think about the various audiences (human and electronic) of web-based writing and how a title can influence readership. That said, I’m not sure I’m capable of cleaning up my act…

Highlight of the week? Listening to Michael Chabon read from his awesome serialized adventure novel Gentlemen of the Road, which I highly recommend. Where did I do this, you might ask? At my library, that’s where.