BIB_08: Bowie, J. L. (2009). Beyond the universal: the universe of users approach to user-centered design. In S. K. Miller-Cochran & R. L. Rodrigo (Eds.), Rhetorically rethinking usability : theories, practices, and methodologies (pp. 135-163). Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press.

Shot through a feminist lens, J. L. Bowie’s discussion of user challenges the conventional notion of the “universal user” in usability studies. Informed by postmodern feminism, Bowie emphasizes on the differences among users, and complicates the theory, methods, and practice of universalization in technology design and development process. She offers an extensive literature review in user-centered design (UCD) and usability studies that concern the understanding of the user, the propose a "the universe of users" approach to user-centered design.  and uses a study on the gender differences in Web navigation to demonstrate how contextualized consideration of user differences can benefit technology design and advocate for equality among users.

The challenge to the notion of "universal user" in this book chapter echoes many others such as Krug and Cooper, but unlike these two who holds an engineering perspective and aims to design usable technology that meet most users' needs in spite of their differences, Bowie, from a rhetorical perspective, embraces the differences and concerns herself with designing for not only the majority of users, but particularly for minorities or the unprivileged such as women or people with disability. This difference echoes the differences between rhetoric studies and HCI that Skeen has observed in his chapter in Rhetorically Rethinking Usability. 

BIB_07: Massanari, A. L. (2010). Designing for imaginary friends: Information architecture, personas and the politics of user-centered design. New Media & Society, 12(3), 401-416.

In this article, Massanari interrogates the notion of "user" in HCI and UCD discourse and three tropes commonly used: the "stupid user," the "user as victim," and the "user as co-creator" (p. 404). He associates the three tropes of the "user" with three approaches to design; the "stupid user" is an assumption of system-centered design, the "user as victim" is associated with user-centered design, and the "user as co-creator" is associated with participatory and activity-centered design. In response to the idea and practice of using personas to understand users, Massanari argues that personas are hegemonic and often reductive in nature. He also points out other researchers' work that indicates that personas cannot always effectively solve the problems of "the elastic user," "self-referential design," and "design edge cases" in the design process in practice (p. 409). In addition, the perceived non-scientific nature of personas in an organization makes it difficult to convince everyone to take them seriously. However, Massanari seems to agree that personas can serve as effective communication tools. Drawing on cultural rhetorical theory, specifically, the Marxian concept of "interpolation" and postmodern idea of "simulation," Massanari argues that personas interpolate the users into what the designers want them to be, and since the personas are simulacra of the real users, they tend to blur the distinction and create an illusion for the designers that they are designing for the real users but actually they are designing for their simulacra. In the conclusion, Massanari points out that the advance of technology and its increasing integration in our life "will likely require new approaches to user research" p. 412).

Massanari's view on personas is challenges the practice increasingly accepted and employed in the IA and technology design industry, partly as established experts such as Alan Cooper's promotion. Using personas in the design process is almost inevitably hegemonic and reductive, yet it is well received in the industry as Cooper indicates in the foreword on his book The Inmates Are Running the Asylum. There certainly connects to what Coppola (2005) has pointed out "a universal drive for utility [that] underlies technical communication research" (p. 263) and beyond. Massanari has briefly touched the topic of Web 2.0 technology in this article, but has not further elaborated on the idea. Nevertheless, the insight this piece offers is still valuable in the context of Web 2.0.

RR_05: Cooper, A. (2004). The inmates are running the asylum. Indianapolis, IN: Sams.

Offering valuable insights in usable software-based products design, Cooper's book is foremost a rhetorical piece that advocates in the IT industry for a process of software-development that starts with interaction design preceding programming. On achieving this purpose, Cooper pushes for the methods for interaction design such as persona and goal-directed design. Although there are a few points I do not completely agree on, I found Cooper's work convincing and a useful resource for my project on cultural usability and Web 2.0.

First of all, Cooper's notion of interaction design is a useful concept worthy of our attention. Cooper distinguishes interaction design from interface design and prefers the former “because 'interface' suggests that you have code over here, people over there, and an interface in between that passes messages between them. It implies that only the interface is answerable to the users' needs” (p. 26). He goes on to argue about interface design that “[l]ike putting an Armani suit on Attila the Hun, interface design only tells how to dress up an existing behavior” (ibid). For an interaction designer, according to Cooper, the design of a product does not only involve interface design, but also behavioral design and conceptual design. He explains that “[b]ehavioral design tells how the elements of the software should act and communicate” (ibid). However, “[i]nteraction designers also work from the outside in, starting from the goals the user is trying to achieve, with an eye toward the broader goals of the business, the capabilities of the technology and the component tasks” (ibid). Thus it is important to include conceptual design, “which considers what is valuable for the users in the first place” (ibid), in the design process (ibid). Cooper argues that the order to the design process should start from conceptual design, then move on to behavioral design, and finally interface design (ibid).

Cooper's view on the interface is very narrow, which is limited to page layout or graphic design, something that “dresses up” the more crucial behaviors of application. Intentionally or unintentionally, Cooper trivializes interface design just as the way he trivializes the “aesthetic” element of design (p. 149).

There are a couple of prejudices and misconceptions involved in his views. First of all, the prejudice against “aesthetic” design that is subject to “subjective” judgment. Judgment of aesthetics is subjective to a certain extent, but that does not mean that such judgment is invalid or groundless. It is also dismissive and a bit pompous for Cooper to assume that design before the digital age only involved aesthetics but had nothing to do with “cognitive friction,” or “the resistance encountered by a human intellect when it engages with a complex system of rules that change as the problem changes” (p. 19). Think of architecture or industrial design, and Cooper's assumption is just a misconception that reinforces the misunderstanding of design as visual design that he himself opposes.

More importantly, to equal interface design as visual design with the only purpose for aesthetics is another misconception of Cooper's argument. The interface is often expressed visually, but it is more than just the “look” of the more heavy lifting code. Norman's (2002) notion of the “system image,” or the “physical structure” of the system (p. 16), can be used to understand the interface. According to Norman, the system image bridges the gap between what the designer designs (the design model) and what the user thinks how the system work (the user's model). Interface, as the physical thing where the interaction between the user and the machine happens is where the system image is materialized to the user. Therefore, interface design does not only involve the page layout, graphic design, or the looks of a system, but how the system is translated and presented to the user. If Cooper's concept of “cognitive friction” is useful at at all, we have to recognize that, contrary to what he claims, the interface is precisely where the cognitive friction occurs for the interface is the site where the human and the machine meet.

Despite these problematic claims, Cooper's insight is valuable in many ways. To be fair, his emphasis on the interaction over visual design (not interface design) seems to fit today's Web development better because of the increasing merging of Web sites and Web-based applications. More importantly, his work points out the problem with software-development processes many companies in the industry employ, and that is programming without interaction design. The product that often results from this process is what he calls a “dancing bear” which does not work well, but because the user does not have any other choices and has to get the job done, she/he has to tolerate the hard-to-use product. In this sense, Cooper is a champion advocate on behalf of the users. The process he advocates compared to the processes that do not work is illustrated as below (pp. 204-205):




From the illustrations, we can tell the Cooper would not agree with usability advocates such as Nielsen that user testing is the only way for good product design. Cooper points out some of the problems with user testing. First of all, he argues that “[t]he main reason why empirical user testing has been widely accepted in the high-tech business is that it fits easily into the existing sequence” (p. 204). That means that user testing actually reinforces the old process of software-development. One of the biggest challenges with user testing is that “[m]ost user testing depends on having a working program to test with, so necessarily it must wait until the program is up and running. This places user testing in the sequence conveniently in parallel to bug testing” (p. 204). This creates a problem, for “[n]o matter who does the designing, regardless of the method she might apply, the effect of design will be negligible if the coding is underway. A fundamental premise of bringing design to the software-development process is that it must occur before the programming begins” (p. 204).

Cooper argues that testing before programming, or what he calls the “pre-facto user testing” is “similar to the pure research that one would expect to find in a university setting” (p. 206). He uses an example of his colleague who tested the effectiveness of the status bar in the interface of a program. He argues that although the test result—users don't pay much attention to the status bar—is valuable, it does not “shed much insight on the underlying problems” (p. 206). Here again, the biggest challenge with pre-fecto user testing and testing or testing during the development of the product is that the product that gets tested is not yet built or completed, and thus any simulacrum (“either a quickly written prototype program or a 'puppet-show' made from paper cutouts or some equivalent, low-tech material” (p. 206)) used in the testing will result in inaccurate testing results.

Although he points out these problems with usability testing, Cooper does not completely dismiss its value. He agrees that “[t]houghtful user testing can uncover a designer's incorrect assumptions. Exposing your design work to users and then redesigning iteratively is always better than not doing so. Some new technologies […] are so untried that the insight provided by basic user testing can be of great value” (p. 207).

That said, usability testing to Cooper perhaps has more rhetorical value than engineering value:

Arguably, the most valuable contribution of usability testing is made when programmers are forced to sit behind the one-way mirrors to view typical users struggling with their programs. The programmers shocked and incredulous, shouting sentiments like, “You are testing mental retards!” Usability testing is a useful whack on the side of the head of recalcitrant software engineers, showing them that there is indeed a problem. It can serve the same purpose for management, too. (p. 207)

Considering that Cooper's mean concern in the book is how to persuade companies (and the personnel in the companies from the management to programmers) to embrace the development process that incorporate interaction design before programming, his view on user testing should not be thought as dismissive. However, I'm not sure if he does justice to the user testing method in usability studies.

Perhaps the most important and useful insight Cooper offers in his book is the idea of “goal-directed design” (p. 151). Unlike many others' work on usability (such as Nielsen or Barnum), Cooper distinguishes goals from tasks radically. He emphasizes that “[g]oals are not the same things as tasks. A goals is an end condition, whereas a task is an intermediate process needed to achieve the goal.” (p. 150). He then goes on and notes that “[t]here is an easy way to tell the difference between tasks and goals. Tasks change as technology changes, but goals have the pleasant property of remaining very stable” (p. 150). This means that the consideration of tasks is more closely linked to the product (and especially the features of the product), whereas the consideration of goals must focus on the user. Cooper argues that “[d]esigning from tasks instead of goals is one of the main causes of frustrating and ineffective interaction” and “asking, 'What are the user's goals?' lets us see through the confusion and create more appropriate and satisfactory designs” (p. 151). The goal-directed design requires the designers to analyze the user's goals to solve problems, which often can result in “very different—and much better—solutions” (p. 151).

The goal-directed design shifts the focus from technologies to the user. Especially, the personal goals are considered by Cooper as the most important goals the designer has to consider when designing a product. We can sense this approach in Norman's (2002) work, but Cooper is really pushing this idea forward in his work. The approach of goal-directed design, when applied to user research, will require the researcher to look at the original goals of the user, and then think of the system on the basis of these goals. When applied to research in cultural usability, the approach requires the researcher to shift from asking what color scheme on a Web site is more appealing to users from a certain culture, to understanding what are the important things a user wants to achieve (e.g., to fulfill her/his responsibilities for her/his parents in Confucian cultures), given her/his specific cultural context.

BIB_05: Cooper, A. (2004). The inmates are running the asylum. Indianapolis, IN: Sams.

In this book, Cooper analyzes the problems with the software-development processes employed by many companies in the industry that produce hard-to-use IT products for users. Based on his understanding of the current practices in the industry and their problems, he advocates for an innovation of process towards one that incorporates interaction design in the beginning of the development prior to programming. The methods of interaction design Cooper introduces in the book include using user personas, scenarios, and goal analysis to design for the user. He also talks about the importance of documentation and teamwork.

Cooper's work offers a lot of insight into the software-development process. His concept of interaction design emphasizes the user's goals when interacting with technologies. Although some of his arguments, such as that about interface design, are not quite convincing, and his intention of promoting interaction design is not without self-interest, his emphasis on the user's goals and the methods of persona and goal-directed design are very useful. Moreover, Cooper's book is quite persuasive and should be a good book especially for managers and programmers, for many problems identified by Cooper in software-development are not easy to be seen from those who focus only on marketing or technology.

RR_03: Norman, D. A. (2002). The design of everyday things (1st Basic paperback. ed.). New York: Basic Books.

Norman's book is perhaps one of the most widely cited books in usability and human-computer interaction literature. With a foot in psychology, Norman explains the user's cognitive process as she/he interacts with technology in daily life, which Norman use to informs a user-centered design approach to design things from tea kettles to computers that can be easily used by the user. One reason for this book's success is that Norman explains in an understandable layperson's language the complexity of the interaction between human beings and the world, and provides many important basic concepts, frameworks, and principles that can be used to lay down a theoretical foundation for UCD. I'll discuss a few of them that relate to cultural Web usability and design.

First of all, Norman uses a model called “seven stages of action” to explain how human beings interact with the physical world (p. 48):

1. Forming the goal
2. Forming the intention
3. Specifying an action
4. Executing the action
5. Perceiving the state of the world
6. Interpreting the state of the world
7. Evaluating the outcome

The Seven Stages of Action

The “seven stages of action” has several implications to design and usability. First of all, it implies a goal-oriented usability design, which is very different from the task-oriented approach. Norman points out the difference between goals and tasks, which is often neglected by programmers and usability experts, according to Alan Cooper. Norman explains the relationship between goals and intentions below:

Goals do not state precisely what to do—where and how to move, what to pick up. To lead to actions goals must be transformed into specific statements of what is to be done, statements that I call intentions. A goal is something to be achieved, often vaguely stated. An intention is a specific action taken to get to the goal. (p. 46)

Here what Norman calls “intention” is what Cooper, among others, would call “task.” Good design should not design for tasks, but goals. Only focusing on tasks, designers or usability experts may lose the sight of what goals the user wants to achieve through these tasks. However, very often usability studies focus on testing how well the IT product, be it an application or a Web site, can afford the user's successful completion of tasks, rather than understanding how well the product can help the user achieve her/his goals. (Further discussion on the categorization of goals and goal-oriented design will follow later in my response to Cooper's The Inmates Are Running the Asylum.) In Norman's “seven stages of action,” the goal is put in an initiating position that guides the execution and evaluation of the action. Based on this understanding, usability research should start from the goals, instead of from the tasks. The first question to ask should be “What does the user wants to accomplish to make her/his life better?” rather than “(How fast) can the user complete task X?”

The goal-oriented approach in Web design and usability studies will be very useful when it comes to look at Web sites in various cultures. This is because people who have different values may want/need different things in their lives, and thus have different goals to achieve when using the Web. Therefore, by only testing the performance on completing pre-selected tasks, researchers already have made assumptions about the users' goals, and thus may miss out important and rich data that will tell us more about the users and what they expect for the technologies to fit in their lives.

Another implication of Norman's “seven stages of action” to cultural usability is that throughout every stage, the user's cultural background and the cultural context of the action are necessarily factors that affect the outcomes—the user's perception of the world, her/his choice of action, and her/his evaluation of the action, etc. Recognizing the complexity that the cultural contexts contributes to user's interaction with the world through technologies is crucial to designing IT products that benefits the users in world where cultural diverse is increasingly valued.

In his book, Norman also uses the framework of conceptual model and system image to explain how human beings interact with a device and why the design of the interface is critical. Norman defines he conceptual model as a model formed mentally of a device to “simulate its operation” (p. 12). The conceptual model consists of the design model, “the conceptualization that the designer has in mind” (p. 189), and the user's model, the user's “mental model developed through interaction with the system” (p. 16) and to “explain the operation of the system” (p. 189). Norman argues that “[i]deally, the user's model and the design model are equivalent” (p. 190). In other words, the user's model needs to match the design model for the user to properly use the system. However, this is not always the case in practice when the user's model and the design model mismatch. The breakdown, according to Norman, often happens in the system image, which is the link between the user's model and the design model. Because “the user and designer communicate only through the system itself: its physical appearance, its operation, the way it responds, and the manuals and instructions that accompany it” (p. 190), the design of the physical appearance, i.e., the interface, is crucial to user's interaction with the system.

Conceptual model is a very important concept in Norman's work. In fact, he argues that the two fundamental “principles of design for understandability and usability” are “(1) provide a good conceptual model and (2) make things visible” (p. 13). At a closer look, the two principles of design for usability are closely related if not overlapping, for to provide a good conceptual model, the design has to offer an accurate system image, which relies on the visible physical structure of the device, and a system that sends feedback to the user constantly so that the users will know what's going on. The importance of the conceptual model and visibility leads us to a discussion about affordances, constraints, and mappings, three qualities of technologies expressed through the visible structure of the system that communicate to the user the “clues to how things work” (p. 12).

Affordance, constraints and mappings are three important concepts that can be used to evaluate usability of technologies. Affordance is “the perceived and actual properties of the thing, primarily those fundamental properties that determine just how the thing could possibly be used” (p. 9). Constraints are forces that control the permissible choices of actions can be taken with a product. Norman classifies constraints into physical, semantic, cultural, and logical constraints (pp. 84-86). Finally, mapping describes the relationship between “the controls and their movements and the results in the world” (p. 23). Norman especially emphasizes on the importance of natural mapping in design, which means “taking advantage of physical analogies and cultural standards, leads to immediate understanding” (p. 23).

These concepts are especially important to understanding usability for Web 2.0, for which the traditional usability guidelines have become inadequate. They can serve as a useful framework to guide the exploration of new usability criteria and issues for Web 2.0. The framework can help us examine the interaction between the user and Web 2.0 from the more fundamental goal-oriented perspective, and allow us to go beyond the scope of the older version of the Web and look at the Web with a fresh eye. I'll give a simple example. One difference between Web 2.0 and the older version, let's just call it Web 1.0 for convenience, is that Web 2.0 connects Web sites, applications, and users in a remarkable more extensive way than Web 1.0. As Bill Wolff and his colleagues in their article “Rethinking Usability for Web 2.0 and Beyond” point out, this interconnectedness poses new usability problems. One of them is related to sharing: “Whose responsibility is it to ensure the usability and functionality of each share on each page?” This is a emergent usability issue that is not addressed in traditional Web usability research and guidelines. However, through the lens of constraints, we can speak of a usability that takes account and even takes advantage of this constraint for Web 2.0.

To summarize, I will argue that precisely because of the very fundamental nature of Norman's work, it will be very useful in the usability research in a new Web environment of today.

References

Cooper, A. (2004). The inmates are running the asylum. Indianapolis, IN: Sams.

Wolff, W. I., Fitzpatrick, K., & Youssef, R. (2009). Rethinking usability for Web 2.0 and beyond. Currents in Electronic Literacy, (John Slatin Memorial Issue). Retrieved from http://currents.cwrl.utexas.edu/2009WolffFitzpatrickYoussef

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.