This article offers productive usability as a usability approach that focuses on the usefulness of civic Web sites. Although some sites meet traditional usability standards, civic sites might fail to support technical literacy, productive inquiry, collaboration, and a multidimensional perspective-all essential ingredients for citizen-initiated change online. In this article, we map productive usability onto broader philosophies of usability and offer a framework for rethinking usability in civic settings and for teaching productive usability.How do we design and test for more useful Web sites for citizen action? In asking this question, we trouble notions of usability that in the past have served us well. However, we must ask because civic Web sites-community-based digital spaces that can enable public deliberationmight not be best served by our conventional approaches to Web usability. We are using ''conventional'' here in its best sense; conventional approaches have become conventions or standard practices because they work. Conventional usability (Krug, 2006;Nielsen, 1999) sells books because designers need commonsense approaches to Web usability (to borrow Krug's subtitle). But civic Web sites can sail through conventional usability tests by meeting all sorts of valid and important criteria. With self-evident navigation, scannable layouts, and links distinguishable at a glance, these sites might test well and still not enable citizen collaboration, work, or action. As Web site designers, teachers of Web design, and users of civic Web sites, we have much at stake in how citizens solve problems in their communities and in professional writing and rhetoric's role in enabling that participation. Civic online spaces can provide citizens with effective resources to solve problems in their communities but only if the Web site development takes into account the literacy practices that citizens must adopt to make sense of information and what counts as useful information for these citizens.Sometimes working on behalf of one's own community's interests is high-stakes work-for example, contending with poisoned groundwater. Sometimes it is not. In technical communication, we expend much (warranted) energy grappling with life-or-death technical failures. With

Twenty years after the publication of Patricia Sullivan's "Beyond a narrow conception of usability testing" in the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON PROFESSIONAL COMMUNICATION, three scholars-all Sullivan's students-reflect on the history and development of usability testing and research. Following Sullivan, this article argues that usability bridges the divide between science and rhetoric and asserts that usability is most effective when it respects the knowledge-making practices of a variety of disciplines. By interrogating trends in usability method, the authors argue for a definition of usability that relies on multiple epistemologies to triangulate knowledge-making. The article opens with a brief history of the development of usability methods and argues that usability requires a balance between empirical observation and rhetoric. Usability interprets human action and is enriched by articulating context and accepting contingency. Usability relies on effective collaboration and cooperation among stakeholders in the design of technology. Ultimately, professional and technical communication scholars are best prepared to coin new knowledge with a long and wide view of usability.

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