CONCLUSIONS

Coming from a journalism background, my motivation for this project stemmed from a desire to investigate how interactive tools in a designed space could aid in the writing process. With particular interests in social media and user-generated content, I gravitated toward an audience of users who have pioneered the pathways of these interests. The addition of the digital personal space into everyday life has major implications for how users interact with each other and information—this is something I wanted to explore within this project.

I began my design studies by parsing out the components of Toulmin’s Model and mapping each to small moments, tools, or functions that could be pieced together to become part of a larger system. After translating some of these into a larger system in a series of behavior studies, I learned that isolating each component through encapsulation within different moments in the system was not the best approach for incorporating the model as a foundation for my system. Toulmin’s Model proved to be much more of a stepping-stone that informed my explorations, instead of an explicit constant. As my studies progressed, I gravitated toward the search behaviors of grazing, deep diving, and the feedback loop, all three of which informed my final iterations. The high content wireframes and Flash animations that comprise these final iterations, therefore, became a hybrid of the two models that embraced the behaviors of my target users, while also giving them a foundation from which to work and learn.

As my research continues, I hope to further investigate digital writing spaces, exploring how design can help teach users to critically engage instead of passively consume. As social media continues to morph and grow, design will shape they way that users interact with each other and produce and share information. I look forward to contributing to the discourse surrounding the intersection between design, media, and user experience.