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.
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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.