Over the next year, The Cincinnati Review will embark on a redesign of its website to create a more enjoyable and accessible experience for our readers. This space is where we share that journey with you.
I Know What You Did (On Our Website) Last Summer
Be honest with yourself: what does your experience of reading an online literary journal look like?
I’d wager a bet that, in most cases, it looks like this: you’re a writer whose friend or acquaintance has just published a piece in a literary journal you’re interested in, and the link has just been shared on social media. Your feelings are some kind of mix of excitement, curiosity, and envy. You follow the link. You read the piece—maybe you skim part of it, if it’s long. Where’s your next stop?
Odds are you’ll look for how to submit to the journal. You’ll spend 30 seconds to a minute reading the submissions page (shorter if submissions are closed), and you’ll drift away or close out the window.
I’ve worked on the web presence of a number of literary journals over the years, closely monitoring their analytics and social media engagement. It’s what I do for CR. I’ve also worked in the private sector, in user experience. Though I’m a writer first, and selecting work for our miCRo series is one of my greatest joys in my job, I was hired last year to apply my UX knowledge and skills to a redesign of our website. We’re in the research stages of the process now, which is why I’m paying so much attention, these days, to the ways people engage with us online.
UX, by the way, simply refers to the way users interact with—experience—an object or product. You have user experiences every day with the objects that surround you. Your pillow, for example, offers a specific user experience. It may be soft or hard, hot or cool, lumpy or smooth. Maybe it feels good to lie on, or maybe it hurts your neck. Maybe, like me, you sometimes need to fold it to get the right neck support (I really need a new pillow). By studying the way users experience an object or product, a UX designer can engineer that product to be easier, more accessible, and more delightful to use. This is fundamentally a commercial and capitalistic process (better and easier to use = more sales), but its byproduct, I’ve learned, can be meaningful, even transcendent, when applied to art. I never would have admitted this 10 or even five years ago, but every piece of writing is a user experience. I used to call this “being generous to the reader.”
Though the above scenario about visiting a lit journal online may not be yours, it is by far the most common path people take through our site and many other online literary journals. People just don’t read online journals like they read books. Personally, I don’t even read print literary journals like I do books, from beginning-to-end; rather, I page through or select a piece from the table of contents and read that in one sitting. Yet, many—if not most—literary journals operate as if people read every issue from cover-to-cover, or navigate over to the site and spend a long time reading all of the pieces in an issue. This just isn’t the case, and as long as we’re making this assumption we may not be creating the best user experience for readers.
Why do lit journals even need to think about UX?
The short, and simplest answer, is money. If you offer subscriptions but people aren’t staying on your site long enough to consider them, you’re pushing revenue away. Besides covering the cost of running a journal, this becomes important in situations where people who don’t understand art are questioning your value.
But there are other reasons a lit journal might consider the UX of their site (and even their print journal), key to them being accessibility. Historically, the rarefied world of lit journals has been built on exclusion. The old-school lit journal embraced “difficulty.” Sometimes the subject matter was difficult, but sometimes the journal, itself, was just difficult to get ahold of. You had to know where to look for it. You had to know it existed, which was, in and of itself, a sort of barrier to entry. It made no concessions to writers of differing abilities, classes, races, genders, ages, etc. You had to sell yourself to the lit journal—it should never be selling itself to you. Though we’ve made major strides in opening the lit world up to a wider readership thanks, especially, to the influence of newer journals with significant web presences, many journals have, consciously or unconsciously, carried this tradition forward. In many cases, tradition looks a lot like exclusion—and, though history and reputation should never be forgotten, there are ways to adapt a storied history into something new, beautiful, and useful.
I have so much to say on the topic of literary journals and UX that I can’t possibly stop here—but, for today, I must. I invite you to follow The Cincinnati Review on our UX journey, and plan on sharing our milestones and discoveries with you along the way.
