First of all, Johnson offers a succinct description of what the user-centered approach to technology is and seeks to achieve compared to the system-centered approach:
In a user-centered approach to technology, users are active participants in the design, development, implementation, and maintenance of the technology. This is not meant to imply that users are the sole or dominant forces in technology development. Rather, they are allowed to take part in a negotiated process of technology design, development, and use that has only rarely been practiced. Users are encouraged and invited to "have a say," in other words, and thus they are physically or discursively present in the decision-making processes of technological development. Invited to become actively involved with the technology in a greater, more integrated fashion, users become members of a team, but not just token members as they are in many usability approaches that merely invite users in at the end of the development cycle to validate a product. Because the users are involved with decision making in the user-centered model, they have power that historically has been concentrated solely in the province of the designers of technology (or in the province of the technological artifact itself, if you adhere to a strong determinist stance). (p. 32)This definition of the user-centered approach to technology touches on a couple of important points:
First, in a user-centered approach to technology, users' active participation is an important part in the life cycle of technology, from the stage of design, through development and implementation, to maintenance. This is in contrast to some system-centered approach that involves the user only in some stages such as perhaps towards the completion of technology development for user testing, or as what Johnson calls treating users a kind of “token members” (p. 32). One example he points out is the user involvement in interface design: “The interface is crucial to the user of the technology, but more often than not this intimate connecting point between the technology and the user is relegated to the end of the development cycle—at a point where there is often little that can be done to solve any problems the user may have while operating the technology” (pp. 27-28). As the intermediate between the user and the system, the interface perhaps is the foremost familiar if not important part of the system to the user, and thus its development is more likely to involve the user than any other part. Relegating it to the end of the development cycle often means that users get involved in the development process only up to this point, which to Johnson is a serious problem.
Second, rather than the “dominant” agent in the process, the user takes part in the negotiation of the technology design, development, and use. In other words, the user is only one stakeholder in the process, who is allowed to voice her/his opinion and contribute her/his knowledge to the process. Johnson makes this point clear so that the user's knowledge from use will claim a valued position in a way that does not oppress others. From this point, we can also see the egalitarian view that guides the user-centered approach. By encouraging users claiming the “power that historically has been concentrated solely in the province of the designers of technology” (p. 32), the user-centered approach aims to decenter the power. It is in this sense that user-centered design should not only be conceived in an engineering perspective, but in a sociopolitical perspective.
Without being too reductive, one could argue that taking a rhetorical position, Johnson's description of user-centered approach to technology falls into the humanist camp of usability studies, which values complexity over reduction and which has strong political and emancipatory concerns.
Perhaps the biggest contribution of Johnson in this book is the user-centered rhetorical complex of technology he developed that can be used as a framework to analyze technology that centers on the user and the contextualized use. Borrowing I. A. Richard and James Kinneavy's rhetorical triangle metaphor, Johnson develops a triangle depicting a user-centered rhetoric (see figure below).
The triangle depicts an technological environment that consists of the user, the artisan/designer, the artifact/system, and user tasks/system actions with the user situated in the center. The elements in environment are essential for the interaction between the user and the system. Based on this triangle, Johnson further complicates the situation by surrounding it with three layers of context, or “pressures and constraints” in the surrounding contexts or situations, forming what he calls a user-centered rhetorical complex. The first layer consists of the user activities of “learning, doing, and producing” (p. 38). The second layer consists of “constraints that larger human networks place upon technological use,” which Johnson depicts as “disciplines, institutions, and communities” (ibid). Finally, the outer layer consists of “the factors of culture and history” (p. 39).
In relation to the user-centered rhetorical complex is another concept developed by Johnson, the user's situation. Johnson defines the user's situation as the activity “the user is engaged in and, in some cases, the moment in which this engagement occurs” (p. 31). Although he points out that the activities can be described specifically as learning, doing, and producing, the notion of user's situation should be understood in a broader sense. In other words, the user's situation is affected by all the elements in the user-centered rhetorical complex. For instance, when Johnson discusses the importance of localizing the user's situation in a specific context, he notes that it is important to understand the user's role in an organization. In the case of documentation, “[t]he specific nature of users' work, then, drives documentation that is customized to the context of use instead of generically explained to a universal user who is the construct of a writer's imagination” (pp. 129-130). In this case, Johnson is pointing out the importance of considering the second layer of the context of use in the user-centered rhetorical complex, namely institution and discipline and the user's relationship with them, when we trying to understand the user's situation.
The user-centered rhetorical complex is a very useful framework when we consider cultural usability of technology. Note here the complex and sometime confusing use of the term “culture,” which has multiple meanings depending on the specific context of use. Here in the user-centered rhetorical complex, Johnson seems to use the term “culture” in a narrow sense to denote the higher level of human actions and meanings as a society. However, later in the book, when he discuss computer user documentation, Johnson uses “culture” in a broad sense “to mean any community that might have common bonds due to context or practice: that is, workplace cultures, classroom cultures, and even electronic cultures such as those emerging from the use of the Internet or other computer networked arrangements” (121). The reason for Johnson to use a narrow meaning of culture in his discussion of the user-centered rhetorical complex is because used in broader sense, culture can include all the elements in the three layers (rings) of context. Therefore, using the term broadly cannot achieve any meaningful objective here. However, when speaking of cultural usability and cultural localization, we should not understand culture only in the narrow sense in terms of national cultures or other higher level cultures, but also consider the local cultures that the user resides.
Finally, it will interesting to compare Johnson's model to Sun's (2004) framework of cultural usability (see figure below) (p. 59). I will return to this topic in the future post on Sun.
Reference
Sun, H. (2004). Expanding the scope of localization: A cultural usability perspective on mobile text messaging use in American and Chinese contexts. Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, New York.
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