Thursday, September 12, 2013

Make it Work

"The closer people have to move to the borders of their responsibilities or capabilities because of technological constraints, the more confusion and difficulty they experience in conducting their work" (230).

This might not have been the best week for me to read an article discussing usability and how developers need to pay more attention to what's important to users when it comes to the functionality of the product.  I have spent a ridiculous amount of troubleshooting issues with the online portfolio system our Composition program just adopted.  More than once over the past few days, I have wanted to reply to the reps for the parent company's development team with the phrase, "You clearly do not understand the complex tasks that we want to and need to perform!"  I also thought about referencing the pill-dispenser example Mirel provides in the introduction to her piece (maybe the complexity of our tasks will make sense more sense if I stop using composition/pedagogical terms??), but then I realized how ridiculous I'd sound trying to claim that the "poor usability due to a mismatch with actual work and needs" should be considered a "life-or-death matter" in this situation.

In "Advancing a Vision of Usability," Mirel focuses on the origins and implications of usability issues, and suggests that technical communicators need to become usability experts.  She notes, "[Technical communicators] are trained, perhaps as are no other specialists in human-computer interaction, in the rhetorical perspectives necessary for effectively matching the media and design of software support to particular audiences, purposes, activities, and contexts" (220).

She claims "usability leaders need to" perform certain actions in order to bring about a much needed change in the way software development is approached (I use the quoted phrase because M uses the same signal phrase throughout the entire article).  Below is a list the I compiled of her claims.

"Usability leaders need to":
  • introduce a new vision of what it takes to support complex work-in-context (220)
  • bring about innovation and change in task analysis, task representations, and development processes (220)
  • distinguish between ease of use and usefulness (222)
  • overcome teammates' piecemeal notions of usability and show that partial usability is no more favorable to users than partial system performance (222)
  • bring strong empirical data on users' needs, practices, and boundaries of tolerance (222)
  • need to lay a groundwork to clearly show how the dimensions of usability are related to each other for a given product and what this relationship implies for software design for complex tasks (222)
  • argue that complex tasks are complex because they are not comprised of well-defined, rule-based, serial steps that cumulatively and predictably sum to the whole of a task (225)
  • argue against developing programs that model complex work through a built-in prepackaging of means and ends (226)
  • assure that task representations are framed around task structure and the structure of functional relationships and interactions (227)
  • apply a conceptual framework that encourages ans sustains such a view of complex tasks and leads to adequate support for them(227)
  • promote and encourage a structural approach to design by likening structural task representation to genres of performance (230)
  • show their teams why and how taking one emphasis or another in task representations matters (232)
  • stress that how problem solving is modeled affects how designers interpret what problem solvers do and why, and guides how they design for it (232)
  • introduce the need to design for flexibility and adaptation by proposing a shift in emphasis from actions to structures in task representation (232)
  • move usability concerns beyond interface design (232)
  • assure usability concerns inform program scope, architecture, and feature lists (232)
  • bring usability into front-end decisions to induce changes in the processes of the development cycle (232)
In sum, Mirel believes usability leaders need to step in and, well, lead software developers into gaining a better understanding of and sensitivity to the complex tasks users will need to perform while using the software and products.

What I'm wondering is where these usability leaders are going to come from.  At the beginning of the article (and at the beginning of this post), it is stated that technical communicators -- the students in our classes? -- are the most equipped to take on that role.  Mirel also acknowledges, however, "there is no class [at the university] per se that can teach the ability to create a vision of usability and usefulness, to earn and assert leadership, or to make and influence paradigmatic shifts" (236).  When we develop our syllabus for our tech. comm. classes (specifically 402/3), should we be incorporating training in these areas?  What assignments or activities could we include that would encourage our students to want to take on the position of usability leaders?  (connection to Freedman & Adam vs. Blakeslee)

I see obvious connections between Mirel's discussion of appropriate and effective development and Redish's break-down of information/document design ("Working for its users means that the people who must or want to use the information can 1- find what they need; 2- understand what they find; 3- use what they understand appropriately" 212).  In this chapter of the book especially, there seems to be an emphasis on the relationship between the users and the products, and the relationship between the developers and the users.  I was also reminded a lot of of Johnson's "User-Centered" that we read a few weeks ago.  The common sentiment seems to be good intentions are not good enough when it comes to developing products; in order to succeed, the gap between developers and users must be bridged, and it is the responsibility of the users (or usability leaders as representatives for the users) to guide the change the current approach to development.

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