Usability and User-centered design are the benchmarks for anyone designing digital applications or content. A search on Amazon.com of the term “user experience,” narrowed to include only: Books<Computers & Internet<Web Development, yields almost 900 titles. These books largely address the gap between information architecture and human interaction. Computer language and underlying structure is logical, inflexible, mathematic, and invisible, qualities most people have difficulty relating to. To overcome this gap, designers started investigating how real people actually used their products. This resulted in a revolution in design, resulting in more intuitive and easy to use interfaces like Microsoft Windows, a myriad of kiosks, and iPhone touch screens. While difficult to use technology demanded and fueled a paradigm shift, it seems user-centered content lagged behind. That same Amazon search yielded only 17 titles interested in user-centered content development. Kristina Halvorson bemoans this distinction in a critique of Jesse James Garrett’s concept called "5 planes of user experience," a user-centered design process that segregates and defines “content requirements” as merely a technical feature of an application. When Halvorson protests, “.Content is not as feature. It’s a complex ever-evolving, intricate body of information, that requires ongoing care and feeding,” she not resisting the inclusion of user-centricity in information architecture. Rather, she is calling for more user-focus from content providers.
From the perspective of a communicator, or rhetorician this should be a no-brainer. Though our tradition might use the word audience instead of user. Aristotle introduced audience consideration in a thin, three-faceted, schema based on “. . . wealth, power and relative youth.” (Vandenberg p. 18) Theophrastus wrote The Characters, in which he offered brief, rather pessimistic, character sketches of 30 types of men under the pretense of increasing understanding, and for moral instruction. Perhaps we might consider these rudimentary personas.[1] In his influential essay The Writer’s Audience is Always a Fiction, Walter Ong highlights the student writer’s dilemma when they are instructed to imagine a person or audience, as tool for invention. He is getting at the cognitive difficulty, actually the impossibility, of constructing a precise actual audience. This is especially true for student writers who have such a limited scope of experience, knowledge and familiarity with the particulars of academic discourse. How can a seventeen high-school graduate appreciate and construct an argument persuasive to a 45 year-old university professor? I find Ong’s thesis helpful, not only for understanding students, but also for myself as a communicator. How much of my own work is merely reflective of my own ideas, and divorced from the reality of my audience? Content providers create products that bridge the goals of the organization and the goals specific target audience. While the actual audience may remain a “fiction,” a researched, user-centered approach can help us to create a more accurate picture of the audience portion of that equation. Definitely more accurate than one we construct in our mind.
Though there are many books on user-centric design, the nuts and bolts of end user research are often glazed over. The exception is About Face3 written by Alan Cooper. Cooper, and his team of designers, advocate for qualitative research to help designers, “. . .understand the user population as human-beings.” This research helps clarify design decisions and provides, “…valuable business insights that are not revealed through traditional market research.” (p. 51) Traditional market research would yield quantitative analysis of demographics, frequency of use, market segmentation, etc. Cooper uses five types of qualitative research:
- Stakeholder interviews
- Subject matter expert interviews
- User and customer interviews
- Literature review
- Product/prototype competitive audits
Cooper’s approach mirrors qualitative research methods found in composition, technical writing and communications research. A compilation of these academic disciplines’ approach to qualitative research includes:
· Artifact/Document analysis
· Meta Analysis
· Interviews
· Focus Groups
· Ethnography
· Case Study Research
· Surveys
All of these methods, Cooper’s and the academic, are designed to present the end user, living and working within their environment and interacting with actual documents. These methods may be less “scientific” than traditional quantitative approaches, yet they yield data that is richer in detail, and more accessible for content providers. All of these provide strategies for content providers, regardless of budget or staff, to gather information from constituencies important to the organization’s goals.
Bibliography
Blakeslee, Ann and Cathy Fleischer. Becoming a Writing Researcher. Mahwah, NJ:
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2007. Print.
Cooper, Alan, David Cronin and Robert Reimann. About Face 3: The Essentials of
Interaction Design. Indianapolis, IN: Wiley Publishing, 2007. Print.
Creswell, John W. Research Design: Qualitative, Quantitative, and Mixed Methods
Approaches. Los Angeles, CA: Sage, 2009. Print.
Garrett, Jesse James. The Elements of User Experience: User Centered Design for the Web and Beyond, 2nd Edition. Berkeley, CA: New Riders, 2011. Print.
Halvorson, Kristina, Content Strategy for the Web. Berkeley, CA: New Riders, 2010. Print.
Vandenber, Peter. “Audience.” Keywords In Composition Studies. Heilker, Paul and Peter Vandenberg, eds. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1996. 18-21. Print.
Hoekman, Robert. Designing the Obvious: A Common Sense Approach to Web and Mobile Application Design. Berkeley, CA: New Riders, 2007. Print.
Hughes, Michael and George Hayhoe. A Research Primer for Technical Communication: Methods, Exemplars, and Analyses. New York: Routledge, 2008. Print.
Kirsch, Gesa and Patricia Sullivan. Methods and Methodology in Composition Research. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1992. Print
Krug, Steve. Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, 2nd Edition. Berkeley, CA: New Riders, 2011. Print.
MacNealy, Mary Sue. Strategies for Empirical Research in Writing. Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon, 1999. Print.
Ong, Walter. “The Writer’s Audience is Always a Fiction.” PMLA 90 (1975) : 9-21. Print.
Stewart, Thomas D. Principles of Research in Communication. Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon, 2002. Print.
Thophrastus. The Characters. http://www.eudaemonist.com/biblion/characters
[1] Personas, the fictional characters created by designers to represent amalgamations of user characteristics found through research.
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