This past week, we spent a lot of time planning our websites and exploring digital tools, constantly keeping our potential audience in mind. Throughout this process, I thought a lot about how projects in the digital humanities are meant to engage an audience. If a project’s digital platform is hard to use, it detracts from the user’s experience and distances them from the project. As such, it is vitally important that a website be easy to understand so that a user can connect with the material on it, the person who created it, and actively learn something new from the material presented to them.
Design is really important in DH stuff, as we’ve kind of talked about … it tends to be the thing digital scholars get hung up on a lot, especially if they aren’t web designers. So, yes, knowing your audience is a huge part of the design, since you will want people to interact with your project in different ways, and different aspects will be of more interest/value to some.