Studying Usability in the Field: Qualitative Research Techniques for Technical Communication - Gould and Doheny-Farina

Precise: Studying Usability in the Field: Qualitative Research Techniques for Technical Communicators – Gould and Doheny-Farina

Qualitative Field Research - Research that involves investigating few things in-depth, in the “natural environments of those under study” — “an art learned only by doing” (329-30). Underlying is a belief that usability can only begin to be understood by “observing how people solve problems in their normal environment”, getting close to the user’s point of view to understand their actions and reactions regarding how documentation is implemented.

What can be Learned in the Field – user demographics, user work environments; user information privileges, how information is used, user behavior, information accuracy/usefulness, user satisfaction

Limitations to Qualitative Field Research – “researchers using qualitative techniques may not discover anything that applies to a larger population” (330). Qualitative research is situated, specific, and informative, but cannot be applied to a larger population.

Quantitative Methods in Qualitative Field Research - “A complete usability program combines qualitative and quantitative research… (The two) are interdependent and should reinforce on another” (332). A researcher can go into the field and perform qualitative research to provide information about a task for a design, establish variables for later quantitative research, and validate quantitative results and instruments. Qualitative research allows you to investigate with fewer resources.

Field Research Constraints: time, political (relationships), legal, ethical, and budgetary (334).

Preparing for Field Research - Preliminary research: speak with fellow employees (those with first-hand knowledge of the material in question), review past user feedback, and read professional material (trade books, conferences, etc). Create your research plan: decide what to study, who to study, and how to study them.  Acquire authorization, research the investigation site, and set-up formal/informal meetings (335).

Field Research Techniques

-Questionnaires: utilize “open-ended” questions to allow “users respond any way they see fit” (336). Ask the questions plainly, and ask few of the open-ended variety.

-Interviews: provide more in-depth information than surveys. Maintain a “non-threatening” persona to encourage participation and increase comfort, using open questions to prompt discussion of matters at length. Can be formal or informal.

Three types of Formal Interviews: Post-hoc (interview user after they just use a product); Discourse-Based (encourage discussion by emphasizing difference in new and old practices; and Scenario-Based, observe the users working in their natural work environment. To do this, you must maintain relationships with users who will serve as key informants, find “effective vantage pints from which to observe”, and have a clear sense of the activity network of the environment.

Information can be recorded through: field notes (observational, theoretical, and methodological), using recording technology (like voice recorders or photographs), and conducting read(think)-aloud protocols, where users read the documentation in question and is encouraged to verbalize their thoughts during the task (340). This information can be analyzed by transcribing and compiling, coding according to the Grounded Theory (Glaser and Strauss), then completed in a trip report (341). 

Works Cited

Gould, Emilie and Stephen Doheny-Farina. “Studying Usability in the Field: Qualitative Research Techniques for Technical Communicators.” Effective Documentation: What we have learned from Research. Ed. Stephan Doheny-Farina. Boston: MIT Press. 1988. 329-343. Book.

Carlisle Sargent: Miller Precise

What’s Practical About Technical Communication? || Carolyn Miller

The Meaning of Practical

·       “Practical” is associated with action. Miller writes that practical rhetoric is concerned with discourse—(1) for its potential to get things done—and at the same time (2) its ability to utilize a “how-to” method of instruction. Technical writing makes use of both of these dimensions.

o   Early Greek rhetoric also involved these 2 dimensions, which Bernstein has categorized into “low” and “high” aspects of the practical. The low sense involves day-to-day, mundane tasks; the high involves human conduct and community well-being. Technical writing was considered “the world of work” in commerce and production, and was often associated with the low aspects of “the practical”.

A Conceptual Contradiction

·       Miller is critical of the “low” categorization of rhetoric. She introduces a contradiction within the self-justifying discourse of tech writing pedagogy: “the attempt to hold both that nonacademic rhetorical practices are inadequate (and therefore need to be improved via instruction) and that they serve as authoritative models (and therefore define instruction)”.

o   So where does good writing come from? Academia or industry?

·       One side of the contradiction justifies teaching technical writing in school because when students begin in industry, they are bad writers. The other side justifies studying industry to gain knowledge about what/how to teach tech writing. So academia is both fueling and being fueled by industry.

Practice as Descriptive or Prescriptive

·       The basis of practice in tech writing is problematic, which results in confusing “what is” (description) with “what ought to be” (prescription).

o   However, we need to learn the difference between what is good practice and what is bad practice, which Miller says the critics do not offer.

o   Dobrin suggests reform at both the academic and industrial levels, and that teachers need to help their students work better with others.

·       Important questions that arise from this debate: Whose interests does a practice serve? How do we decide whose interests should be served?

Practice and Higher Education

·       The relationship between nonacademic practice and academic instruction is reflects a bigger picture argument: what is the appropriate relationship between job prep and cultural awareness?

o   In the late 19^th c, Cornell’s president chose a pluralistic curriculum that prepared students for many kinds of lives.  This spurred college curriculums to include heavy vocational training for students.

o   Modernly, “industry-university collaboration” is most often seen through applied research and development, as well as internships, advisory councils, certification programs, etc.

§  These professional programs have set the precedent for making technical communication practical: library science, public relations, information science, business, journalism, & careers in training and development.

·       This discourse assumes that “what is common practice is useful and what is useful is good” à the good that is sought is that of an existing industry or profession (normally tied to private interests).

o   Miller writes that regular contact between the university and industry “makes students more valuable to industry.”

Praxis and Techne

·       Miller writes that the “oppositions” that are found in the discourse of higher education are pretty much unresolvable (see pg. 21), but they do form creative tension.

·       Techne- defined by Aristotle as “a productive state that is truly reasoned” which requires both knowing how and knowing that. Aristotle joins these ideas by “deriving knowing how from knowing that” (getting prescription from description).

o   However, some critics say that Aristotle isn’t making the connection between rhetoric and productive knowledge, and is instead treating rhetoric as theory.

o   The reasoning related to production à techne. The reasoning related to performance/conduct à phronesis (prudence). Techne is concerned with the useful, and prudence with the good.

·       Miller concludes that understanding practical rhetoric as conduct rather than production should change the way we teach technical writing: there is more room for conceptualization and questioning, as well as improving ourselves with economic (Marx) and political (Aristotle) responsibility. 

Part II: The Composing Process

·       Basically highlights the importance teaching students how to work collaboratively, as is most common in industry.

Jesse James Garrett's "Meet the Elements"

Jesse James Garrett’s seminal work, The Elements of User Experience, offers a great introduction to the field of user experience, and remains a must-have for both novices and experienced practitioners alike even today, nearly twelve years since its first publication. The chapter read and discussed today, Meet the Elements, introduces Garrett’s widely-popularized and talked-about diagram of the five planes of user experience and the mutually-dependent relationships they have with each other in the implementation of large-scale web sites and commercial web applications. Garrett defines the five planes – strategy, scope, structure, skeleton, surface – as moving on a scale from abstract and broad to concrete and particular, and representing differing points temporally in the overall design process. Starting at the beginning of the design process, with the most abstract plane, is the strategy plane. Garrett defines it as not only the business and corporate interests behind making the site, but also the needs and wants of the users and target audiences directly interacting with the site itself. Next comes the scope plane, which refers to the overall functions, features and specifications the site will contain, in order to fulfill its objective and the strategy implemented earlier. Following the scope plane is the structure plane, or the overall navigation layouts and workflows which allow users to easily navigate the site through mouse clicks in order to accomplish their desired tasks. After the structure plane comes the skeleton plane, which Garrett defines as the placement and layout of elements along the interface, like any buttons, links, images, diagrams and blocks of text that compose the site’s overall layout. Lastly, and at the front-end of the site or web application is the surface plane, or the front-end graphical interfaces and visual designs that users directly interact with, in order to carry out the specific function they came to the site to fulfill.

The five planes of user experience offer a conceptual framework for designers and developers alike to begin to think about solving problems in the lead-up to launching commercial websites and applications. While each plane is directly influenced and defined by its preceding plane, Garrett says it’s a two-way street, and that the design process must always remain recursive and iterative, with designers sometimes reevaluating or rethinking certain design decisions on lower planes in response to questions or problems that arise on higher planes. Accordingly, Garrett also says that rather than making sure each preceding plane has been thoroughly completed before moving onto the next one, like finishing outlining the scope of the site before moving onto the overall structure and navigation flow, designers must only make sure to not finish a preceding plane before finishing a higher plane. Garrett then moves on to discussing the way that the Internet changed from hypertext information systems responsible solely for transmitting information, like in the early days, to complex graphical and software interfaces that change and adapt in response to user interaction and input. While it’s very rare that sites and applications fit neatly into either category, hypertext information space or software interface, terminology and specializations will vary depending on which side of the five planes they fall on. Having an understanding of the difference between either category of the Web leads to the diagram being divided among the five panels, so that strategy is composed of both user needs, or the goals for the site from a user’s perspective, and site objectives, or the business goals and objectives that go into launching a site or application. Moving up to the scope plane, on the software side are functional specifications, or detailed descriptions of the features that should be included on a site, and on the information space side are content requirements, or a list of the total content and information that should be included in the site. On the structure plane, interaction design takes place on the software side, where the overall interactions a user has with the system are defined, and information architecture takes place on the information side, where content elements are arranged and structured logically and intuitively. The skeleton plane is composed of information design on both sides, or the effective and intuitive presentation of information and content elements, interface design on the software side, or the arrangement of elements along the interface to facilitate easy navigation and understanding, and navigation design on the information side, or the arrangement of screen elements that allow users to effectively move through information architectures. Lastly, on the surface plane comes visual design on both sides, or the “look” in look and feel of graphical interfaces and web elements that the user first sees and interacts with.