Productive Usability: Fostering Civic Engagement and Creating More Useful Online Spaces for Public Deliberation

Abstract

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

A multi-faceted approach to characterizing user behavior and experience in a digital mental health intervention

“…Usability is often conceptualized in terms of the effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction with which products can be used by users, to achieve particular goals within a specific context of use[54,55]. In this study, we adopted a broader conceptualization of usability which included characteristics such as helpfulness and usefulness, which have been seen as antecedents of satisfaction[56], and have been included in arguments and taxonomies for usability[57,58].…”

mHealth Apps for Older Adults: A Method for Development and User Experience Design Evaluation

“…Scholars have modified and developed methodologies and methods for UX evaluation of health and medical technology beyond the traditional vacuum of the laboratory to address the interconnected contexts and embodied needs of users of wearable medical devices (e.g., Arduser, 2018; Jones, Gouge, & Crilley, 2017; Kennedy, 2018; Kessler, 2016) and a wearable fitness tracker (Welhausen, 2018). Implicit in these studies is the concept of the user as a contributor and practitioner in a complex design process (Dilger, 2006; Howard, 2008; Johnson, Salvo, & Zoetewey, 2007; Simmons & Zoetewey, 2012). Concepts of complex systems and multiplicities pervade research in which scholars consider usability testing and UX for health-care technologies.…”

Disrupting the Past to Disrupt the Future: An Antenarrative of Technical Communication

“…Indeed, this was Simmons' (2007) argument, as she constructed a heuristic for public decision making. Beyond environmental studies, technical communicators have argued for the development of community-based research in a variety of contexts: medical rhetoric (Scott, 2003), community literacy (Grabill, 2001), urban planning (Grabill, 2003;Moore & Elliott, 2016), community websites (Simmons & Grabill, 2007;Simmons & Zoetewey, 2012), public policy and legislation (Hannah, 2010), and training/education (Dubinsky, 2004;Eble & Gaillet, 2004). These community-based scholarly agendas have shaped not only research but also pedagogy: for example, service-and community-learning curricula.…”

“…But user advocacy is no simple matter. It is complex and difficult to decide whose experience, needs, and voice should be most influential in shaping our research, pedagogy, and practice, let alone how to go about facilitating that influence (Getto, 2014;Moore, 2013;Mukavetz, 2014;Simmons & Zoetewey, 2012;Walton, 2013b). In addressing this challenge, many inclusive scholars intentionally shift power toward users, particularly those who are marginalized, creating space for marginalized users' expertise to be recognized as legitimate (e.g., Agboka, 2014;Dura, Singhal, & Elias, 2013;Johnson, 1998;Jones, 2016a;Mukavetz, 2014;Price, Walton, & Petersen, 2014;Walton, 2016).…”