RR_01: Barnum, C. M. (2002). Usability testing and research. New York: Longman.

Barnum's text book, although maybe a bit dated, is a great start for usability students. It is both a theory book that maps out the theory and key issues of usability research and user-centered design (UCD), and a how-to book that meticulously explains how to conduct usability testing and create documents for the testing. I'll discuss a few issues that interest me or relate to my dissertation project below.

First of all, Barnum summarizes nicely the definition of usability and UCD. She draws on the definitions of usability by key sources/writers/researchers such as the Internationalization Organization for Standardization, Nielsen, and Dumas and Redish, all widely cited in usability studies literature, and points out that the focus of usability studies is the user. To make her point, she defines usability negatively, as not (p. 6):

• Quality assurance
• Zero defects
• Utility of design features
• Intrinsic in products

Pointing out that “[t]hese terms reflect issues related to the product itself, not to the interaction of a person with the product” (p. 6), she draws attention to the distinction between product quality and usability. She further explains that usability has two requirements, “usefulness” and “satisfaction,” and contends that usability is determined by the user's perception of the quality of the product (p. 6-7). Two points are worth discussing here. First, her notion of usefulness is a key concept when we consider the split between task-oriented and goal-oriented usability studies. While task-oriented usability focuses on designing usable products, the goal-oriented usability focuses on designing useful products.

Although the terms “task” and “goal” are often used interchangeably by some authors, and the distinction between these two is not always clear in a lot of literature, this split can been seen among usability researchers and practitioners such as Nielsen, Cooper, and Krug. Barnum seems to agree with Cooper's view that we should design for the user's goals instead of tasks. When later on discussing task analysis, Barnum lists the goals of task analysis as (p. 88):

1. What users' goals are, not just the tasks they perform
2. What processes they us to achieve their goals
3. What characteristics shape the way they perform tasks and achieve goals (different groups of users may have different characteristics and goals)
4. What previous experience shapes users' approaches to tasks
5. What is most important to users or what is most helpful to them in performing tasks
6. What impact the environment has on their ability to perform tasks

This list shows the distinction between goals and tasks. The goals are what users want to achieve in their life, such as succeeding a course. The tasks are more specific than goals. They are the means to goal, i.e., what the user needs to do to achieve her/his goals. In the example of the user's goal being succeeding a course, one of the tasks will be buying textbooks online. The users have multilevel goals, so the task of buying textbooks online are also means to achieve other goals such as saving money, and saving gas going to a bookstore and time browsing there. Understanding these goals, articulated most eloquently in Cooper's The Inmates Are Running the Asylum, is essential in designing useful and usable products for the users. The goal-oriented approach is useful in cultural usability research for it can yield rich data about users due to its focus on their goals that are necessarily formed in their specific context of use.

Second, Barnum's argument of perception can be controversial. Although this book focuses on usability testing, Barnum's approach to usability research is inclusive in terms of methods. She talks about different methods in UCD in which the researcher or designer interact with users in different ways. These methods include focus group, prototyping, interviews, survey, etc. These methods are designed to get feedback from users. In other words, they are designed to obtain data about the user's perception of the product's usability. However, some hardliner usability testing proponents such as Nielsen and Krug will argue that using these “soft” methods, usability issues or usability breakdowns cannot be revealed accurately or adequately. They argue that empirical usability testing is the only way to know if a product works for the user. The tension between these two views is not surprising if we take the researchers' backgrounds into account. Barnum is a technical communication scholar who has a background in humanities (rhetoric). Nielsen and Krug both have engineering background on their resume. I will argue that methods that originated in humanities and those in sciences can help us obtain different data to understand the user and her/his interaction with technologies from different angles. Especially in today's complex technological environment where technologies are so profoundly entrenched on everyone's life, pure empirical methods may not be adequate to collect rich and nuance data about users.

The last thing I want to discuss about this book is its chapter on Web usability (chapter 9). To be honest, I'm a bit disappointed with this chapter. Not only the material is dated (which however is understandable because of its subject matter), but it seems that the whole chapter is pretty much a rip off of Nielsen's work. Also, Barnum does not seem to have carefully thought through Web usability issues. For instance, when she talks about understanding the real users' needs, she summarizes the users' reasons to use the Web into three groups, “information (content), sales (commerce), and interaction (communication with other people)” (p. 365). The grouping is not only crude but also leaves out many other reasons (goals) for users to use the Web, such as entertainment, (personal, political...) expression, advocacy and mobilization, etc. These groups are so broad that I suspect that they are actually of any productive value. She may argue that reasons such as expression and advocacy can be grouped under interaction. If that's the case, I will argue that everything can be grouped under information, because ultimately the Web is information. Barnum here is a bit self-contradictory—as an advocate of designing for users' goals, and the individual needs of users, her crude grouping does seem a bit careless.