In Making Comics, Scott McCloud identifies five decisions that comics creators must make in creating comics. The first of these is “choice of moment” — which moments in a scene get exposed in the comic. Looking at any comic, you can see how this is a difficult and important decision: why does the panel show the characters in one particular configuration?

Making Comics includes a series of exercises at the end of each chapter. Livia, Austin, James and I got together to talk comics and try the first exercise, meant to illustrate the challenge of choice of moment. Though our discussion did stray into work-related topics, we mostly focused on the exercise itself — drawing sixteen panels that represent the storyline of a particular movie. The challenge was to reduce a full-length movie to sixteen moments, using only pictures.

The exercise was really hard, but really fun. While drawing my stick-figure rendition of Princess Bride, I made these observations:

• Most everything had to be abstracted. I don’t know if this was an artifact of not using words, or simply having to translate from one medium to another. In my comic, for example, the Prince demands Buttercup’s hand in marriage. To communicate this, I had the Prince “say” (using a typical comic convention of a dialog balloon) “wedding cake”. The second part of the exercise calls for reducing the number of panels to eight. Which to remove? Thinking through this, I realized that this would require further abstraction, eliminating most of the relevant details.
• Planning is good. Each of us, before starting, made lists and thought through various details of our stories. James even storyboarded his storyboard. For me, I made a list of moments to capture, and I did some character development, clarifying how I would represent each important characters, to ensure consistency from panel to panel.
• Some behaviors are extremely difficult to represent visually. Recall in the Princess Bride how two guys who start out Bad (the Spanish swordsman and the Giant) become Good later in the movie, rescuing the Man in Black from the Pit of Dispair. These kinds of moral transitions can be confusing without using words: why would bad guys who had been trying to kill our hero now be saving him? James, in drawing out The Matrix, ran into the same thing. When Neo is sparring with Morpheus, there’s no (obvious, clear) way to visualize that this is just practice, he’s not “really” fighting his mentor.

Looking at user experience documentation as a form of comic is going to become increasingly relevant as web experiences and interfaces become more complex, subtle, and nuanced. In showing AJAX transitions, for example, we designers need to decide which moments in the interaction communicate the design most clearly.

In addition to CLARITY, good storytelling gets the audience to CARE, according to McCloud. This is a more difficult concept to translate to documentation, but for me the relevant parallel is, well, RELEVANCE. There are many perspectives to web development — visual design, business, development, data integrity, etc. — and documents that try to address all these perspectives are unlikely to succeed. Instead, a document needs to focus on a particular perspective and focus the content on what’s relevant to that perspective.

Page 61: “By segregating evidence by mode (word, number, image, graph), the current-day computer approach contradicts the spirit of sparklines, a spirit that makes no distinction among words, numbers, graphics, images. It is all evidence , after all. A good system for evidence display should be centered on evidence, not on a collection of application programs each devoted to a single mode of information.”

(More interesting quotes to come as I continue reading.)

In an ironic, but not altogether unexpected turn, my blog has become a series of excuses as to why I’m not blogging. Apologies to legions of readers (the two of you who aren’t my mom).

Look, you have to admit the excuses are pretty good: I’m into the third month of a new business, the fourth month of a new book, and the sixth month of a new baby. On top of all this, I had the privilege and honor to speak at Nielsen-Norman Group’s User Experience 2006, delivering three workshops, once in London and once in Seattle. This year has been especially ambitious for me (though, admittedly, between me and my wife I’m not the one who pushed an entire human out of my body) and I’m thinking I’ll need to tone it down next year.

The experiences I had in Seattle and London were life-changing. In addition to rubbing elbows with people I’ve been following since starting in the field (Jakob, the Don, and Tog!), I got an autographed copy of Scott McCloud’s new book right from the man himself. As a Jew, I think I must now know what it felt like to be a little kid at Christmas and meeting Santa for the first time.

But what was most rewarding was the interaction with the workshop participants. NNg certainly attracts an engaging and intelligent group of people, and every workshop was filled with delegates who themselves had rich and varied experiences to draw from.

The people who come to these sessions don’t seem like the blogging types, but I did stumble upon a review of my Communicating Design session from one of the participants in London. (Thanks for the nice words, John!) I’ve proposed a shorter version of this workshop as a pre-conference tutorial for the IA Summit.

The workshops gave me a lot to think about, too, and I hope to resume posting to greenonions.com in the new year with more thoughts on design methodology, documentation, and linguistics. The new business is humming along nicely, and my partner and I have lots of work to keep us busy through the holidays, so I’ll have my head buried until then.