Stephen Smith: The ESV and Bible Usability

Electronic books (like Amazon’s Kindle) are the next big thing, but they don’t yet give publishers enough flexibility to address usability issues for the Bible. How do we model what happens to people when they encounter the Bible text? Questions like their profession, education, church involvement, where they are when reading, and many others all affect the process of designing usability for Bible readers. (lots of questions and dimensions to this discussion)

After you’ve identified a persona (with particular characteristics), then you can answer some of the questions about how to design the right Bible for this kind of person. Don’t Make Me Think (Stephen Krug) is a good introduction to web usability. Bible publishers and developers should share their usability data so we can all learn.