Response 8_Photoshop

While watching Scott McCloud's TED talk on comics, I really liked one sentence in particular, "...a monitor is just as technically limited when looked at as a page, but not when looked at as a window."

 I'll admit, that sentence coupled with the picture above, blew my mind a little. It also made me think back to the first week of class and our exercise, "the medium is the message". I don't believe that a page is necessarily limiting, it is just another means through which to communicate.

Comics, as presented on paper, have an established order. When a person reads the funnies in a Sunday Telegram, he knows he should read the panels left to right, top to bottom. The fact is however, the author of the comic has no control over how the user consumes the material. How many times have you seen a comic strip, but instead of reading from the beginning, your eyes immediately skip to one of the later panels. Although you may go back to the first panel and read through the strip, you still have consumed the information in a way not intended by the author. A monitor would transform the delivery of a comic and other information. Instead of presenting stationary information all at once, there is more control over the timing, sequencing, and movement of delivery. Authors now have more control over how the user consumes the information. This same control impacts how users are drawn into the information however. There definitely is something to be said for the value that this capability adds to the presentation and thus the user experience, for instance, like being able to reflect a change of direction that the story takes.

Or creating a perpetual story that could really go on and on and on without the user having to "start over" in someway (like going back to the top of the page)

But I think there is also something to be said for knowing what you're getting into. Would you start a book without knowing how many pages is it? After watching a movie for 3 hours that's still going, would you still be uninterested in how much longer it will go?

Not many people make blind investments. Whether they be investments of money, energy, or time... people generally want to know what they are getting into before diving in. A person can look at a page and immediately gauge how long it will take them to consume the material. Based on this estimate, the user will continue forward or decide that it isn't worth it. With infinite scrolling panels like the image above, authors control the experience more, but it is important to still inform the user about what that experience is going to be like.