Designing webtexts for born-digital readers: Seven dimensions of user-centered design

Part website, part academic article, the "born-digital"webtext opens new opportunities for interactive, multimodal scholarship that breaks free from the constraints of print, digitally accessible publishing. However, webtext designers and publishers lack feedback on the experiences of born-digital readers: diverse users accustomed to online resources for whom webtexts are ostensibly designed. This paper provides such feedback by using comparative findings from webtext usability tests conducted with academic faculty and graduate students to elaborate seven dimensions of user-centered webtext design. The dimensions and associated usability findings - including affordances and constraints that facilitate skimming scanning, and close reading, signifiers and conceptual models that familiarize users with unfamiliar designs, and feedback and mappings that help users contextualize their reading and understand their reading progress - provide scope and guidance for the design of born-digital webtexts readers find both useful and usable.