Sociology and Usability Research

The social aspects of interactions, users, and products invite designers to learn more about the communication culture in particular, and consumption in general. To mobile phone designers, the challenge is huge—no phone has only one kind of user in only one kind of context. There are always both experts and novices working the phone in both noisy and quiet settings, to which they bring various cultures with varying opinion sets, values, and learning histories. All of them bring their life, social circle, work demands, and aesthetic taste to the interaction. In this sense, the product never once reaches a stereotypical user with a plain cognitive mind. UIs thus have to serve a huge number of individuals, all different.

That said, contexts do not preclude patterns of use, or even valid usability test results. An interaction with a product is based on the user interface that structures communication. Design solutions are thus most crucial because they impose similarities on the communication, no matter which context they end up in. Moreover, interaction has both context-free and context-sensitive aspects.[12] It is the context-free structure of the user interface that defines possibilities for the context-sensitive aspects. Context-free aspects, of course, can still be tested in laboratory settings with a reasonable expectation of generalizable results. Context-sensitive parts of the interaction can be evaluated only “on location.” The key is to combine various methods for a fuller picture of how a product fares among its target audience.

With respect to practical research activities for product development, the arguments above have two kinds of consequences. The first affects the quality and amount of data gathered in studies. Usability tests that treat the user as a universal mind do not extrapolate findings into a larger context. It is important to widen the settings of a usability test by including, for example, a section of questions to define the user’s market segment and that individual’s position with respect to technology in general. It is also important to get beyond the obvious statistical data on demographics. The ultimate goal is to collect information about a user’s socially shaped attitudes toward the technology or product category in question.

The second consequence affects testing locations. Usability studies have traditionally been conducted in laboratories, in a controlled environment, like an experiment in natural science. This kind of setting does not reflect the myriad of changes inherent in the usage situation or in the user. Bringing the test into a real-life context has been one further step taken by many practitioners since the late 1990s.

All in all, sociology widens the user interaction study by introducing three major themes:

  1. Change. The individual has different “development phases” as a consumer. His or her preferences change in relation to the socially shaped meanings that products acquire.

  2. Culture. Culture is a set of practices that shape our interaction with machines and thus influence their usability.

  3. Fragmentation. There is variety in human action that cannot be explained by reference to cultural practices alone. People differ in many ways, and we cannot test them all. Therefore the way users are segmented for studies is crucial to what we learn.

In mobile communications, we can never hope to define all attributes of an environment, nor all situations in which the user will communicate or carry out other mobile tasks. A research mix has to be created that can uncover even the surprising aspects of the new communication phenomena. These phenomena place requirements on the user interfaces as well as on the

product’s feature set. Researching them solely through predefined tests with given tasks does not help us learn what to learn about the users.

[12]H. Sacks, E. A. Schegloff, and G. Jefferson, “A Simplest Systematics for the Organization of Turn-Taking for Conversation,” Language 50(4) (1974).



Mobile Usability(c) How Nokia Changed the Face of the Mobile Phone
Mobile Usability: How Nokia Changed the Face of the Mobile Phone
ISBN: 0071385142
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2005
Pages: 142

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