Designing systems that make sense: what designers say about their communication with users during the usability testing cycle
L. Jenkins · OhioLink ETD Center (Ohio Library and Information Network) · 2004
Usability evaluation methods, specifically usability testing, have been touted as an essential part of a user-centered design (UCD) strategy of having the user as the focus of the design process.Communication is said to be the tacit hallmark of this methodology because research has indicated that design practitioners believe that communication with users makes them more aware of users' needs, and this awareness; in turn, leads to products that users find more useful, usable, and enjoyable.However, the notion that design practitioners perceive such communication to be instructive and/or useful as indicated by their design practice has not been well documented and represents an unexamined assumption-an axiom of sorts-in the design field.This dissertation used Sense-Making Methodology, a methodology in the tradition of Grounded Theory, to isolate the contradictory communication behaviors related to design practitioners' belief in UCD and their practice of UCD methodology, characterized by usability testing, and implementing users' suggestions.The goals of this research were to trace the contradiction to determine how design practitioners perceive communication between themselves and the users-the UCD rationale-and by extension, to better understand communication's impact upon their subsequent design decisions and upon the resulting products.The following research questions flowed from this idea: (a) How does the contradiction between design practitioners' allows users to experiment with products in a controlled setting so as to gain an understanding how useful a product is to the user, in a specific context of use.Rubin (1994) defines usability testing as a process employing "techniques to collect empirical data while observing representative end users using the product to perform representative tasks" (p.22).Usability testing may be conducted in such a way as to promote meaningful interaction between users and designers of ICTs.Meaningful interaction for purposes of this project is the same as communication.Several assumptions exist regarding the communication between users and design practitioners.One assumption is that communication with users makes designers more aware of users' needs and; in turn, makes the product more useful, usable, and enjoyable.An attendant assumption about user-practitioner communication is that the success of the design process is indicative of how successful communication between all stakeholders has been.Design methodologies, such as UCD, that promote and incorporate communication between practitioners and users are said to be useful.However, research on the use of design methodologies indicates that designers rarely follow design methodologies, and when they do; they do so in an idiosyncratic fashion.(Fitzgerald, 1997(Fitzgerald, , 1998) ) This being the case, not only is communication between designers and users--a hallmark of the UCD rationale--assumed to be effective, but the notion that designers perceive such communication as instructive/useful in design is assumed, as well.HCI literature and communication-in-design studies (Guinan, 1986;Guinan & Bostrom, 1986;Sonnenwald, 1993Sonnenwald, , 1995Sonnenwald, ,1996;;Sonnenwald & Lievrouw, 1991) have delineated several communicator roles and communication-related themes pointing to the importance of Contradicting