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Abi and Benton explore the differences between usability and UX (User Experience) through the extended example of a toaster (and share their secret for extra delicious pop-tarts). They discuss the origin of the field of usability and its overlap with technical communication.
Sources and further reading
- Acharya, K. R. (2022). Promoting Social Justice Through Usability in Technical Communication: An Integrative Literature Review. Technical Communication, 69(1), 6–26.
- Gould, J. D., & Lewis, C. (1985). Designing for usability: Key principles and what designers think. Communications of the ACM, 28(3), 300–311.
- Gross, D. (2010, June 25). Apple on iPhone complaints: You’re holding it wrong. CNN. http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/mobile/06/25/iphone.problems.response/index.html
- Johnson, R. R. (1998). User-Centered Technology: A Rhetorical Theory for Computers and Other Mundane Artifacts. SUNY Press.
- Johnson, R. R., Salvo, M. J., & Zoetewey, M. W. (2007). User-centered technology in participatory culture: Two decades “Beyond a narrow conception of usability testing.” IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, 50(4), 320–332.
- Lauer, C., & Brumberger, E. (2016). Technical communication as user experience in a broadening industry landscape. Technical Communication, 63(3), 248–264.
- Marrone, T., & Yerich, K. (2020). Mushrooms of the Upper Midwest: A Simple Guide to Common Mushrooms. Adventure Publications.
- Peuc, G. (2017, January 10). Debunking Bad Design Memes, Part 1: “Design vs. UX” infamous pictures. Medium. https://medium.com/@gpeuc/debunking-bad-design-memes-part-1-design-vs-ux-infamous-pictures-d9b9d3baa728
- Pittato. (2014, February 1). Butter on a pop-tart song from Family Guy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlsFgDjyePc
- Rouse, W. B. (2007). People and organizations: Explorations of human-centered design. John Wiley & Sons.
- Rude, C. D. (2009). Mapping the Research Questions in Technical Communication. Journal of Business and Technical Communication, 23(2), 174–215. https://doi.org/10.1177/1050651908329562
- Salvo, M. J. (2001). Ethics of engagement: User-centered design and rhetorical methodology. Technical Communication Quarterly, 10(3), 273–290.
- Sullivan, P. (1989). Beyond a narrow conception of usability testing. IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, 32(4), 256–264.
- Tham, J., Howard, T., & Verhulsdonck, G. (2022). Extending Design Thinking, Content Strategy, and Artificial Intelligence into Technical Communication and User Experience Design Programs: Further Pedagogical Implications. Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, 00472816211072533.
- Woodman, K. (2010, January 1). Lemon, lime and bitters. Www.Taste.Com.Au. https://www.taste.com.au/recipes/lemon-lime-bitters/58926db0-001c-44d7-b111-aa4c9be3bbc3?nk=5dfbba203f567d930c503285864da61b-1649783351
Transcript
| B | This is episode 17 of TC talk. |
| A | Welcome. I’m Abi. |
| B | and I am Benton. |
| A | I’m the tech comm expert. |
| B | I am a non-expert. |
| A | Yet you are becoming increasingly expert episode by episode. |
| B | Episode by episode. Yes. If we’re going to completely discount all the expertise I gained in, |
| A | the times that you let me rehearse my conference presentations in front of you? I wasn’t half bad. |
| B | No, you weren’t half bad. I was half with it. |
| A | You were half paying attention? |
| B | I don’t know half of you half as well as I should like. And I like less than half of you, half as well as you deserve. |
| A | Nice. |
| B | I fucking nailed that. |
| A | All right, I’ll give you more credit. |
| B | Thanks. |
| A | Now, onto the drinks. |
| B | Interesting. |
| A | Listeners should know that I don’t let you taste it before we record because I want to get an authentic reaction. |
| B | It doesn’t seem really strong. |
| A | It’s sort of a, an inexact science. How much bitters to add. |
| B | Yep. |
| A | What are we drinking today? |
| B | I believe you told me it is a lemon, lime, and bitters. |
| A | Yes. A non-alcoholic drink. |
| B | Oh. That’s why it doesn’t seem very strong. Technically, not fully non-alcoholic because bitters, you know |
| A | It’s negligible. |
| B | It’s negligible. But |
| A | you don’t want to drink it straight. Okay. I’ll tell you the ingredients. I don’t know if I can successfully pull it off with an Australian accent though. Australian. |
| B | You do it first and then I’ll see. |
| A | You didn’t even cover Australian dialects in your dialect class though. |
| B | No. |
| A | Okay. Lemon, lime and bitters. |
| B | Lenin lawn and bitters. |
| A | I wanted to try this because I was watching an Australian show and they kept ordering lemon, lime and bitters. And I was like, What the heck is that? And I looked it up. And it’s simply Sprite with Angostura bitters added. It makes it a little fancier, but I will say I had trouble figuring out what exactly they mean by lemon lime because in all the recipes I found for it, it would say lemonade and then in parentheses, Sprite or other lemon-lime soda. And to me, those are not the same thing. |
| B | Not even close in America. |
| A | To me, lemonade is flat. |
| B | And it is only lemon, not lime. |
| A | Right. I did supplement with a little straight lime juice. And then, like I said, sort of a sprinkling of bitters to your liking. |
| B | You need to start with your lemonade. |
| A | Throw ‘em on the barbie. |
| B | Why the hell would you throw ‘em on the barbie? Add in a dash of Angostura bitters, |
| A | Salt and pepper. |
| B | Salt and pepper? |
| A | I just wanted to say that. |
| B | Oh, don’t put salt and pepper in this drink. If you’re feeling salty, sure add a dash. |
| A | A dash. |
| B | A dash. |
| A | Whatever. Let’s talk about bitters. Angostura bitters come from Trinidad and Tobago. It’s just off the coast of Venezuela. Hey, if you get a fun with fungus, can I have my geography corner? Although all the other content is kind of in my wheelhouse. Trinidad and Tobago is where we get calypso music and the steel drum. Now, bitters to me, remind me of eggnog. I don’t know what goes into eggnog. I have to assume this is an ingredient or at least a similar spice profile. Does it not? |
| B | Yeah. Yeah. Festive. Sure. |
| A | Now, eggnog does not strike me as an inherently refreshing drink. Kind of the opposite. So you wouldn’t think it would, that flavor would pair well with a lemon lime soda, but it works. What I imagine would not work well is mixing eggnog and Sprite. |
| B | I didn’t actually throw up in my mouth a little bit, but I imagine if I were to try that, I would. |
| A | Yes, that’s fair. Today we are talking about usability and UX. UX, as we’ve mentioned before, stands for user experience. And here’s why I wanted to talk about this. Number 1, I feel like this could be the missing piece of some of my research right now. |
| B | Ooh. |
| A | I have data and I need a framework for understanding it. And I think this could fit the bill, but I need to learn more about it. Number 2, usability and user experience are both courses in the curriculum in which I teach. |
| B | Okay. |
| A | And they’re popular courses, but we just don’t always have enough people to teach them. Ideally, I would go into teaching a course with more than a chapters’ headstart on the students. I would say, I’ve been reading dozens of articles and books. And I bit off more than I can chew. I think every researcher can identify with that feeling of, you find some stuff, the more you read, the more that unearths until you’ve got potentially an endless, you know, infinite paths you could take. |
| B | It’s the academic’s version of the Wikipedia rabbit hole. |
| A | Yes. Except there’s more pressure because a Wikipedia rabbit hole is fun. When you’re an academic and you’re trying to write a paper or prepare to teach a course, there’s that feeling of I’ll never know everything there is to know. Maybe that’s just me. |
| B | Imposter syndrome. Yes. It’s just you. You’re the only one who is a fraud here. |
| A | Anyway, I’d like to think I did a reasonably comprehensive job. Although I did not choose to access the microfilm resources in the university library. |
| B | You are a fraud! |
| A | And so I can’t claim to have read everything. |
| B | You know you’re legit when you go to that microfiche reader. |
| A | And so faced with these dozens of resources, I was trying to figure out how do I possibly talk about this in an accessible way on a podcast? And initially, I thought of doing separate episodes on usability and UX, but then I realized they are too interrelated to separate them like that. Furthermore, I had been under the misconception that usability was kind of inferior to UX. Which is puzzling when you’ve got a course on each topic in your curriculum. Like why would we teach old-fashion usability when there’s UX right there. |
| B | Is it actually old-fashioned or is it just re-branding? |
| A | Well, let me put it this way. There’s a right way and a wrong way to think of usability. |
| B | Ooh. |
| A | This is the part where you start taking notes, listeners, because my thesis statement is forthcoming. |
| B | There’ll be a test later. You won’t be able to listen to any more podcasts if you don’t pass. |
| A | Okay. Usability refers to how easy something is to use. Cool, That’s fine. The problem is when you stop there and use that narrow conception to guide your philosophy around designing something. that is not good enough. |
| B | Okay. |
| A | It is something you should consider absolutely, but it should not be a standalone consideration. |
| B | Okay. So ease of use is a small subset of user experience? |
| A | Absolutely. |
| B | Okay. |
| A | And so we can’t do away with it. But again, is insufficient on its own. |
| B | I’m going to try to synthesize here. Usability would look at a toaster and say, ease of use. I want it as simple as possible. You put in bread, you push the thing down, bam, you got toast. That’s good usability. User experience would be like, Now hold on. You might get different grades of bread. You might get bagels. You might get freaking toaster strudels. |
| A | Did you just say bagels? |
| B | Maybe. |
| A | You mean maybe? |
| B | Okay. You’re helping. You might have a toaster strudel or a Pop-Tart that you want to make. |
| A | Maybe you want an Internet connected toaster. I don’t know what the purpose of that would be. |
| B | I don’t know. |
| A | Maybe it texts you when your toast pops up. So you don’t miss it when you’re in the other room. |
| B | For those who can’t be bothered to sit around and wait for toast to happen. User experience would say, I like the idea with the toaster. Can we put a dial on it to adjust how much toasting happens when you put it down. |
| A | False. |
| B | No? |
| A | You are viewing this from a designer-centric perspective. |
| B | Okay. |
| A | You’re thinking, what are all the bells and whistles I could add. A UX perspective would say, let’s get some folks who would be customers. And let’s talk to them and learn who they are. Let’s perhaps watch them as they prepare their breakfast in the morning and learn about their values, needs, attitudes, emotions, even. I mean, we’ve talked before about how when I try to make my coffee in the morning, sometimes I forget to add the literal coffee, or I add the coffee but not the water. |
| B | Neither way works very well. |
| A | And so it would account for human error. It would account for the reality of human beings as being imperfect, shall we say. You know what? There was a phase where you would make my coffee in the morning because you always get up before me. What happened to that? Can we reinstate that? |
| B | Because I get up at 430 and leave around six. |
| A | Fair enough. |
| B | Okay. So maybe user experience would take this usability-designed toaster, watch someone use it. And observe that they’re frustrated that their bread didn’t get toasted enough for them or that it burned a little bit. Or gosh I gotta put this toaster strudel down three freakin times to get it ready. |
| A | It’s true, by the way, the toaster strudels are a challenge because the outside can be burned and on the inside, like the filling is still frozen. Toaster companies get your act together. |
| B | You need to make that flaky surface more thermally conductive. So let’s try adding nano iron into the flaky surface. I just threw that out there because I’m sure it’s an awful idea. Nano anything into food, |
| A | Eggnog and Sprite. Terrible idea. |
| B | There you go. |
| A | Terrible combo. Pop-Tarts, they are a little bit easier than the toaster strudels, they |
| B | They have better thermal conductivity. |
| A | They’re not as delicious, but I have a tip. This comes from my dad. It essentially amounts to adding sugar and butter to things that don’t need sugar and butter, but in this case it’s simply butter your Pop-Tarts. |
| B | [music] Have you ever put butter on a pop-tart? It’s so freaking good. Have you ever put butter on a pop-tart? If you haven’t then I think you should. [end music] |
| A | You’re still a little off because you are thinking in terms of you’ve got this finished product and then you’re watching people use it. You need to step back. You need to start at the beginning. The information you’ve learned about your customers, you then build into the design process. |
| B | Okay. |
| A | Ideally, you even involve the customer somehow. And then once you’ve got a prototype of your toaster, you do some usability testing. You make changes. Quickly. Put out another prototype, test again. It’s this iterative process. |
| B | Exactly. Okay. |
| A | And, and so you are gauging the usability of the product, but you’re also paying attention to, let’s say you do have an Internet connected toaster. What is the experience of accessing the app that coordinates with the toaster? This is highly hypothetical. But again, you’d only internet-connect it if the users were like, Heck, yeah, I want to be able to leave the room for two minutes and not forget my sizzling bagel. |
| B | Oh. Since we’re talking about it. Okay. Oster, if you’re listening and I know you’re not. If they had like a smoke detector built in. So that once it starts to burn, toaster’s like, Oh shit, We’re done. |
| A | Now that’s not a bad idea. So UX or usability can apply to, of course, our toaster, as well as the app, a website, even a paper document such as a ballot. |
| B | Okay, I can’t stop on the toaster. Back to the Future. |
| A | What about it? |
| B | The first scene in the first movie of Back to the Future. Like people have, you know, people have their coffee maker on a timer. Why not toast? |
| A | How many jigawatts does it take to power a toaster? |
| B | 1.21 jigawatts! Marty! Interesting note. Jigawatts is an acceptable pronunciation for what is more commonly pronounced as gigawatts. |
| A | It’s a real thing. |
| B | It is. |
| A | Impossible. |
| B | In fact possible. |
| A | But surely the jigawatts in Back to the Future is spelled with a j because it’s its own fictional thing, right? |
| B | No. It is not fictional. And don’t call me Shirley. |
| A | Thank you for introducing the example of a toaster. I think that was a nice way to get at what the distinctions are. So anyway, how do I even begin to synthesize the research about this topic? I was thinking I could go chronologically. I could try to do it thematically. If I were to group the articles, what kinds of things are they addressing? I started with that second option, trying to group things into themes. And as I was doing so, I came up with categories, like these are the ones about teaching ux. These are the ones about doing UX, like the specifics, the methods. These are the ones about sort of how does UX connect with the discipline of technical communication. These are the ones about how do we enact social justice through our design practices? It occurred to me, these seem familiar. And in fact, they match the categories that Carolyn Rude identified in her article Mapping the research questions in tech comm. |
| B | Oh. |
| A | She has categories of disciplinarity, Pedagogy, Practice, social change. I’m going to go with that. I don’t mean to imply that these are necessarily easily distinguishable categories. For instance, questions of social justice, I think cut across any usability practice you’re doing, whether or not you’re aware of it, right? You’re either being intentional about it or you’re not. Of course, the research about practice is going to feed into the research about pedagogy. With that said, let’s move into this disciplinarity category. To put that in less stodgy terms, how did the field come to be? What does it have to do with technical communication and vice versa, what have been some of the major evolutions in how we’ve thought about it over the years. So this is going to be a bit chronological. And in fact, I would like to name this section UX-istential questions. |
| B | You’re looking proud of yourself for that. |
| A | It wasn’t that bad. Alright. Overview. Over time, there’s been a general shift from systems-centered thinking towards more user-centered thinking or even user-involved thinking. And this emphasis is reflected in the shifting language to define the multi-disciplinary field of usability slash UX. |
| B | Okay. |
| A | That’s part of the challenge here. It goes by a lot of names. I’ll try to address that as we go. And also the shift from systems-centered design to user-centered design is also reflected in the language around users. Edward Tufte has a famous joke. “There are only two industries that refer to their customers as users. Illegal drugs and software.” So somewhere along the way you’ll see the term human-centered design, which acknowledges that the people who use our products are humans. For the purposes of this podcast, I will refer to them as users just because it does clarify their relationship to the process. But by no means am I implying that they lack full human dignity. And by all means, don’t refer to them as research subjects. |
| B | Why not? |
| A | Because that implies that they are being subjected to research, not being involved in the process. Participants, you could call them site visitors. You could be more specific. Are you referring to learners or patients, what have you? So just something to be aware of. Let’s go back in time a little bit. The word usability didn’t come into being until a few decades ago, but usability-adjacent work was happening years before. I bet you can guess what kind of triggered an interest in this topic. |
| B | The Industrial Revolution? |
| A | Nailed it. Late 1800s, early 19 hundreds. That’s where we see the division of labor model, Fordism. Have you ever heard of Taylorism? Frederick Taylor? |
| B | I haven’t. |
| A | He wrote a book called The Principles of Scientific Management. So before usability, we have what you might call the field of human factors or industrial management, I guess, where the focus is on wringing as much labor out of people as you can. |
| B | What could go wrong there, huh? |
| A | Well, I’ll tell you, I’m reading here from the book, User-Centered Technology by Robert Johnson. “Taylor had been commissioned by Bethlehem Steel to study the efficiency of workers who loaded steel ingots onto flatbed railroad cars. Adams describes Taylor’s method as follows.” You’re giving a knowing nod. |
| B | I’m familiar with Bethlehem Steel. There were huge, you know, Pennsylvania had coal and iron ore resources, both of which are required for making steel. And so they had this natural synergy of, boy, we don’t have to move very far. We can just get it from this mountain and from that mountain and put it together and bam. I know that I’ve seen structures here that have Bethlehem Steel stamped on their girders. |
| A | Oh, wow, is it still around? |
| B | That I don’t know. |
| A | “Each ingot weighed 92 pounds. And each man on average loaded 12.5 tons per day.” Which is unbelievable, actually. |
| B | Wow. Holy cow. |
| A | “Taylor studied the workers and their work behavior and concluded that it was possible to load 47 tons per day.” |
| B | Shit. |
| A | “To prove it, Taylor chose a worker who was strong. (The worker ran home every night after carrying iron ingots all day.)” |
| B | Ran home. |
| A | “And who was not too intelligent. (Taylor believed that bright workers found repetitive work monotonous and boring.) And who would do exactly as he was told so that the new steps of the restructured job would be followed. The man started to work, being told when to pick up an ingot, when to walk with it and when to sit down and rest. At the end of the day, he had moved 47.5 tons and he continued to do so thereafter. His increase in productivity earned him a pay increase of 61% from a $1.15 to $1.85 per day in 1898. Management could easily see that the increase in wages was more than offset by the increase in productivity. And they were impressed. Taylor selected other workers and trained them in the same way.” So don’t do this to people. |
| B | Right. |
| A | Back then, obviously the people studying this were advocating for the company, not the worker. Nowadays, if you are a usability specialist, you should advocate for the user. That’s what you’re there for. |
| B | Like Tron. I fight for the user. It’s never mind. |
| A | Is that a line? |
| B | Yes. Yeah. In both the original 1980s Tron and the |
| A | Tron Legacy? |
| B | Tron Legacy. “I fight for the user.” |
| A | Oh man, I’m going to get a screenshot and put it in my syllabus. By the way, Tron Legacy is not that great of a movie, but the soundtrack is fire. |
| B | Fire? Is that an acronym? |
| A | It’s a good soundtrack. |
| B | Yeah, the soundtrack is phenomenal. It’s true. |
| A | Daft Punk. Alright quoting here from Johnson, Salvo and Zoetewey. “The overall goal of most of these investigations was to take already in place technologies and study how people use them. And then in turn, either a) adapt small parts of the machines, such as knobs and dials to make them more efficient and accurate in their use.” Adding a dial to the toaster after the fact. “Or more commonly, b) determine what needed to be taught to the users of the technologies to improve efficiency and accuracy of use.” Focusing on the documentation for the toaster and saying, this is how you use it correctly. |
| B | The Steve Jobs, you’re doing it wrong. |
| A | What’s that? |
| B | People were complaining about not having good signal, holding an iPhone. And he said, You’re doing it wrong. You’re holding it in the wrong way. Because you get better signal if you hold it like a certain way rather than with a different grip. Because if your hand is like right over the antenna, it attenuates the signal. |
| A | It’s interesting that he said that because Apple is kind of known for the modern user experience. But that’s not a particularly helpful approach. You need to anticipate errors and try to be proactive about designing things so that they show users how to use them and don’t need to be corrected because your design was poor or your documentation was lacking. |
| B | Interesting comment on documentation. In my current line of work, I have experience with a fair amount of heavy machinery. Obviously, all heavy machinery has manuals. The typical user of heavy machinery does not read manuals. |
| A | The typical user, period, doesn’t read manuals. |
| B | True. But how bad you going to ruin your day if you screw up the way you hold an iPhone. |
| A | That’s fair. |
| B | I have noticed in my line of work that there is a lot of documentation that is affixed to the equipment, like lubricate three times daily or caution, warning, stay out of the way of outriggers. It could turn your foot into a pancake, sort of things. Which if you’re not familiar, out riggers are those things that shoot out from the sides of trucks or other equipment to increase their effective wheel base. |
| A | Hm. |
| B | Makes them more stable. So they don’t tip over. |
| A | Is there a picture of someone’s foot being turned into a pancake? |
| B | There is. Let me tell you, the more dangerous the equipment, the better the little images are on the warning stickers. |
| A | You need to take photos. |
| B | I’m going to take photos |
| A | and we’re going to post them. |
| B | like okay, so there’s a body dump too, that one of the |
| A | That sounds pernicious. |
| B | And so there’s a, there’s a good one on that too, where, warning, do not lower body dump when personnel are under there and then it’s got your typical stick figure being crushed by the lowering body of the truck. |
| A | I’m glad to hear that they have visual documentation and that it is visible and accessible at the point when you would need |
| B | The reminder, yes. |
| A | That caution. That’s that seems smart. Ideally, and this is probably going on as well. Things would be designed to block the errors from happening in the first place. Something like vehicles having a beeping sound when they back up. |
| B | That too. |
| A | Skipping ahead to the 1940s. This is quoting again from Johnson et al. “For the first time in the history of the US, the Selective Service was implemented in peace time. One of the results of this move was that many soldiers were drafted into the military and were immediately being trained to work dangerous and complicated machinery such as artillery and other types of weapons and explosives.” |
| B | Dangerous by design. |
| A | Yes, exactly. |
| B | Designed to be dangerous not for the user, but |
| A | but are often dangerous to the user. That’s the problem here. “Soldiers were taught by instructors in the very traditional classroom type environments, where they studied textbooks and then went out into the training fields to apply their newly acquired knowledge. The outcome was often disastrous.” |
| B | I bet. |
| A | “Many recruits suffered horrible injuries or died misusing technologies. These consequences gave birth to the first concerted efforts to understand how people read and then apply knowledge to technologies.” So this study of, you could call it the mismatch between humans and technology, or humans and machines came to be known as human factors engineering. This emerged formally around World War Two, in particular with airplanes and usability of the cockpits. |
| B | Cockpits are very busy places. |
| A | And as you can imagine, this opened a real window for Technical Communication. You can see that this history is kind of paralleling the history we laid out in the tech comm’s existential questions episode. Because the next big event for the field was in the 1980s, the explosion in personal computing. And that’s where the word usability first came into use. It’s helpful to see how people have defined the term differently. And as Acharya points out, usability, the term, can refer to an attribute of a thing, right? This is a usable toaster. It can refer to a process of determining how usable something is or making something usable. Like let’s do usability on this toaster. Or it can refer to this multi-disciplinary field of usability studies. And when I say multi-disciplinary, I mean, this can include like more quote unquote, scientific professions like human-computer interaction, human factors engineering, cognitive psychology, and some of the, I would call them more rhetorical professions like technical communication. You could probably throw marketing in there. |
| B | There’s a lot of places I’d like to throw marketing, but. |
| A | So Jacob Nielsen, one of the big names in usability studies, defined five components. Learnability, efficiency, memorability, errors, satisfaction. So something is easy to learn and you also remember how to use it for the next time around. You can get your job done efficiently, you’re satisfied with the end result. Steve Krug’s definition of usability is “a person of average or even below-average ability and experience can figure out how to use the thing to accomplish something without it being more trouble than it’s worth.” Redish says that usability means that “people who use your product can find what they need, understand what they find, and use what they find to meet their needs.” Those last couple of definitions came from more practitioner oriented sources. And let’s turn now to tech comm’s original connections with usability. Patricia Sullivan, as far back as 1989, wrote, “I think it makes sense for technical communicators to be involved in the larger quest for usability. Because we have a close connection to end-users, because we have an audience theory and because we have a growing body of information about users in action.” This was in an article titled “Beyond a narrow conception of usability testing.” And this call to broaden usability has echoed throughout even pretty recent research in tech comm. So it’s been an ongoing concern. In 2011, Redish and Barnum published a paper in Usability Studies Journal on the natural links between usability and tech comm. They were almost introducing the usability field to tech comm, or at least saying, Hey, pay more attention to us. We have good contributions to make. They wrote “in the early days, technical communicators focused mostly on the usability of documents. But it was not long into the era of personal computer software that many technical communicators realized they could be even more helpful to the final product by making the interface communicate better. Why struggle to explain a difficult interaction when we could help more with the user-centered changes to the underlying architecture and wording.” |
| B | Why explain it when you can fix it? |
| A | 20 years after the publication of Sullivan’s piece, three of her students, Johnson et al, who I’ve cited already, published a follow-up, noting that rhetoric is concerned not with certainties, but with relative certainties. “Rhetoric is most applicable, not in deciding general principles, but in articulating the contingent and the particular. We must embrace the contingency of the situated design rather than move toward a science of usability that would ignore context.” So technical communication with a grounding in rhetoric brings context into the equation, brings audience into the equation in a way that some other fields might have unfortunately downplayed. |
| B | Sounds important. |
| A | As far as a more academic definition goes, Keshab Acharya did a recent lit review of usability and tech comm and came up with a definition that represents the consensus in our field, I guess you could say. “Usability, particularly in tech comm, is now broadly perceived as a rhetorical practice for designing a product that satisfies the demands and contingencies of culturally diverse users, including underserved and under privileged user groups in the increasingly globalized world.” So that definition emphasizes the social justice turn in tech comm that we talked about a few episodes back. |
| B | Right. |
| A | In the late nineties, early two thousands, there started to emerge this emphasis on user-centered design or human-centered design. Which the name there is meant to contrast with that original focus on system-centered design. The idea is, like I mentioned before, design stuff for people as they are. Not what you want them to be. People will skip over stuff. People will forget stuff. |
| B | Wait, wait. You mean that not everyone reads the end-user agreements on every piece of software they get? |
| A | Only researchers in my field who are interested in the rhetoric of end-user agreements. People will make mistakes. That means you build into your design a way to go back or undo something. The undo button, that was not always a thing, |
| B | Right. |
| A | The back button in browsers is like the most used button. So something can be a user-centered design. But the idea really is the process. Gould and Lewis in 1985 outlined three principles for a user-centered approach. An early focus on the user. So talk to people before you build your toaster. Empirical measurement, such as usability testing and iteration informed by data from users. Try out a bunch of things, make improvements little by little. You don’t need to stop at designing for humans. You can also design with humans. Michael Salvo in 2001, argued for shifting from observing users to designing with users. And this requires technical communicators to develop skills of dialogue, negotiation, collaboration with people with different perspectives and expertise and cultural backgrounds. There’s a few names for this. Participatory design. Cooperative design, Scandinavian design. This is the ideal. I know it’s not always feasible in work environments to have that much involvement by the users. But it’s a good principle to keep in mind. It’s a good ideal to strive for. The goals of human-centered design, quoting from Rouse, “enhance human capabilities, help overcome human limitations, and foster human acceptance.” Again, we’re seeing that it’s not just about how easy is a thing to use, but how inclusive can we be? |
| B | Not only how easy is it to use? Does it do what the user wants it to do? |
| A | Yes. Focusing on what the user wants versus what you want for the user. And that’s a great shift to discussing UX. If usability focuses on how easy it is to complete a specific task within a specific product, then UX takes that step back and looks at all the context. According to Nielsen, “generally, UX design is based on principles to promote design of intuitive, seamless and pleasing experiences through designs, products, and services. By focusing on total experiences of a user, UX design widens the understanding of usability.” According to Lauer and Brumberger, “UX attempts to build a more holistic and fluid experience, including one that acknowledges the multiple platforms, interfaces, and spaces by which a user may interact with a brand or information product.” And this can include accommodating the unanticipated ways people use technology for their own purposes. So there’s sort of a classic UX meme. I’m going to show you. |
| B | So it looks like a park with kind of walking paths. It’s paved and |
| A | Professionally landscaped. |
| B | Yes, professionally landscaped. There’s a corner and the path is labeled design, and there is a beaten path where foot traffic has turned the grass into dirt that someone is walking on and that’s labeled user experience. I think that the message there is that you may have designed your park for people to stay off the grass. But in reality, the user wants a straight line from where they’re at to where they’re going. And so they will walk on the grass because it will save them ten seconds of their lives. |
| A | And so ideally, the designers would have let people walk around a little bit before actually finalizing where the sidewalks are going to go. |
| B | Yeah. |
| A | Figure out what users want, what are their goals, and support them in that versus trying to redirect them to something that you think looks pretty. Or because that’s how people, quote unquote, should use a product. |
| B | Right. |
| A | Okay, so UX as a field is, again, multidisciplinary, but it’s more, it’s generally more qualitative in approach than some of the contributing disciplines we talked about earlier. What I mean by that is there’s less focus on collecting, say, numerical data through rigorously designed usability studies, and more on that more fluid iterative design process. Where is UX going? An article by Tham, Howard and Verhulsdonk, They identify three trends that technical communicators working in the UX space should be aware of. They are design thinking. |
| B | Okay |
| A | content strategy and AI. I don’t know much about these areas, but basically, they represent a response to the proliferation of smart devices. The fact that people have Internet access all the time, wearables, Internet connected toasters, and how algorithms impact user experience, such as serving you personalized content. I’ll get more into ethical concerns with UX later. But I think a good general question to keep in mind is, creating a usable product, even creating a great experience for users shouldn’t necessarily be definition of good UX. I think there also needs to be that question of, is this a task users should be doing? Or is this an experience that we should want users to have? And I’m thinking here of the role of personalization algorithms in say, radicalizing YouTube viewers or |
| B | social media experiences. |
| A | Yep, Facebook groups, that kind of thing. Again, I think that that social justice orientation could be something that a technical communicator brings to a team. Hopefully they’re not the only one thinking of those things, but. |
| B | Hopefully not. |
| A | To conclude, let me highlight a couple of the big threads that I saw running through this history. First is the evolution towards more consideration of and involvement of users. From viewing humans as cogs in a machine who literally transport 47.5 tons of, like how is that possible? |
| B | I honestly don’t know. |
| A | Through the Principles of Scientific Management. |
| B | In fact, it sounded like that was actually scientific micromanagement. Tell them when to take a rest, when to lift this, where to move it. |
| A | It sounds like a fucking nightmare. |
| B | Oh my gosh. |
| A | So that’s the end of the spectrum we don’t want is actively harming users to make rich people richer. And then we saw an evolution towards viewing users as non-experts who needed things perhaps dumbed down. You ever seen an idiot’s guide to whatever? |
| B | Yeah. |
| A | Whatever. |
| B | The yellow books. |
| A | To thinking of humans as active participants, active contributors who have their own knowledge and backgrounds to inform a product design, to the most interactive end of the spectrum where they actually participate in the design process. |
| B | What, you mean people can have an identity that is larger than consumer? Amazing. |
| A | I hope you’re seeing parallels to our episode about the role of audience in rhetorical theory and technical communication. How it also reflects that shift towards greater involvement of the audience. |
| B | Yes. |
| A | Another big thread in the path from a narrow conception of usability towards UX is broadening of focus from single tasks, single products, to the full experience. That also means it matters when usability comes into the process. Before you design the toaster or after? Ideally all the way through. |
| B | Maybe people don’t even want toast and you’re not making the right sort of thing. |
| A | Exactly. And there are a few, of course, debates, or at least questions that remain about the process of UX. How formal or scientific should it be? Part of this comes from the multidisciplinarity of the field. What’s the value of more exploratory research or generalizable research versus this very local or focused research? And these kinds of choices essentially mirror the kinds of considerations that should come into play with research methods generally. And in fact, we recently made a change in our curriculum to count the UX course as meeting the research requirement for graduate students in our program. |
| B | Oh. |
| A | And I will talk more about specific research methods for usability and UX in the next episode. But overall, I think the most interesting thing to come out of this research for me is seeing UX as such an inherently creative kind of role and also a rather undefined role. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing because UX practitioners need to come in there with a rhetorical, flexible perspective. Assess the context, figure out what kind of data you need, how best to get it, what to do with it, how to report it. And along with that, all the people skills that come into play. Interacting with participants to selling your colleagues on why UX matters. What have you learned about UX and usability today? |
| B | Ux is more of a whole process rather than something that gets tagged on at the end. |
| A | Yes. |
| B | I have one question for you. How many episodes are there going to be in this UX series? |
| A | At this point, I’m looking at at least a three parter. |
| B | Okay. |
| A | Potentially four. So stay tuned. |
| B | One of X of UX. |
| A | We’ve got time for one more thing. |
| B | Is it time for |
| A | Cue the bongos. |
| B | Fun with fungus. Today our fun with fungus is going to revolve around the species Calvatia Gigantea. That’s right, the giant puff ball mushroom. |
| A | I don’t think I’ve ever seen one. |
| B | Well, there is a lovely picture in this book, which is |
| A | It looks like a dinosaur egg. |
| B | Mushrooms of the Upper Midwest. One of the fun names for it is Moon Melon. |
| A | Let me see that picture. Now that looks like a giant muffin right there. |
| B | That is called a skull shaped puffball, which |
| A | I can’t see it. |
| B | Yeah, it is a muffin. That’s absolutely a muffin shape. There are a few different species or varieties of the giant puffball. They are typically about eight to 12 inches across. But they can grow up to three feet wide. So it says in the book, “grows from the ground singly, in groups, or sometimes in large circles called fairy rings, in grassy areas or woodlands.” That is where you’ll find them. They are edible. |
| A | Oh. What is their texture? Like, I hear the word puff ball and I think of cotton ball. And that doesn’t sound appetizing. |
| B | Right. It’s definitely less fibrous than cotton. I have not eaten one. I came upon one in the middle of winter. I saw one at the near the base of, I believe it was an elm tree. It was about the size of like an artisan loaf of bread. Obviously, it was into the spore releasing phase of its maturity, so it was not good for eating. You want to get these when they are immature because then they are edible, the texture is very homogenous. And that’s how you can tell you’ve got a good giant puff ball is you cut into it, it is |
| A | all the same color? |
| B | It is all solid white. As though it were a big marshmallow. They don’t taste like marshmallows. Just to put that out there. But I have seen people on Facebook say that you can take these guys, slice them up, cook them like meat and they’re delicious that way. So I am hoping that I can, with the one that I found that was out of season but still sporing, I am going to take that thing and I am going to attempt to seed our lawn and wooded areas. |
| A | How do you tell if it’s releasing spores versus immature? |
| B | Oh you’ll know. immature, when you cut into it, it’ll be solid white, no structures. When it is beginning to mature it’s going to be starting to convert some of that mass into what? I don’t know. But once it gets to the spore phase, when you touch it, like when you poke at it, |
| A | Is it like when you blow on a dandelion? No. So they just poof out. |
| B | It’s, yeah. So they’re really big and so there’s space for, for air in there. And then it’s got like a hole, spore jet, I guess. The structure where like it purposely makes a hole so that any pressure on the outside will make it more like a bellows and squirt out of a puff of spores. |
| A | Smart. And how far do they travel? |
| B | Depends how windy it is, I suppose. A big puff ball can release several trillion spores. |
| A | What? |
| B | With a T, not B. Million, billion, trillion spores. |
| A | That’s prolific alright. |
| B | Yeah. |
| A | I’m still stuck on the ways to prepare it and serve it because I don’t know. Are you going to have a dinner party and serve roasted puff ball encrusted with Himalayan salt or something? What do you call it? |
| B | Fair question. |
| A | I mean, does it have a better name? Like we’re having puff balls tonight everybody. |
| B | Mushroom steak is what I would call it. |
| A | Okay, that’s fair. What is the takeaway? |
| B | What is the morel of the story? I would say that puff balls in comparison to something like morels, small mushrooms that aren’t soccer ball sized. They definitely have a much bigger pay off. They’re much easier to find. You don’t have to be looking hard to see. |
| A | Yeah. |
| B | And then you have that much more food out of it having picked just one. |
| A | Yeah. Are there any lookalikes that we should be aware of that are inedible? |
| B | There are some kind of lookalikes, but that tends to be only when it’s smaller. And again the solid tell is that you cut it open. |
| A | It’s white. |
| B | No structure. All white. |
| A | Got it. |