Augmenting usability: Cultural elicitation in HCI (original) (raw)
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Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2013
HCI design incorporates usability engineering. However, "usability" is often misunderstood as just "ease-of-use" or "user friendliness". Whereas it should be viewed as software quality with respect to the context of use, which is a fundamental element in usability studies (cf. [1] and [2]). However, there are cases where usability professionals and software engineers do not share the same culture and the same perceptive (cf. [3]). Therefore, it becomes mandatory to improve the collaboration between HCI (usability) engineering and software engineering. This paper looks into the fallacies of product development process in practice and draws lessons learned.
2019
This paper attempts to address how ethnography can be adapted and customized to design research for software development in resource constrained social settings. Based on the experience from the Technology Enabled Maternal and Child Health Care (TEMACC-Ethiopia) research project, the work reported demonstrates the suitability of a modified ethnography in a design research particularly in mediating the communication between users and programmers, facilitating reflection and communication among users, programmers and stakeholders, transforming field study insights into design artefacts, testing and deploying software tools as well as supporting users in their work places. The practical guidelines that emerged in the course of the research work are presented as lessons learnt. Extending the ethnography to support usability assessment and change management beyond those conducted in this study are also identified for further research.
1A Reflection on Designing Low-End Interactive Products for Rural Users in Sub-Sahara Africa
2016
One of the most widely used interactive products by non-western users in developing countries is the mobile phone. Further, the mobile phone market in western countries is rapidly getting saturated (IDC, 2013). It is therefore likely that the market for the next billion mobile phones is among low-end users in the emerging economies. However, to design effective mobile phones or low-end portable technology for these radically different users, research indicates that first, ethnography and ethical participatory design methods need to be used in the design phase and second, in the usability testing phase, current usability evaluation methods need to be adapted and possibly develop new ones that are more appropriate. Through our research in the adaptation and design of interactive technology for Kenyan farmers we illustrate how these suggestions can be put in practice. Sites like the Kenyan one we refer to have now become places of local and global negotiations, where the key insights a...
Rewriting Context and Analysis: Bringing Anthropology into HCI Research
Advances in Human Computer Interaction, 2008
Advances in Human-Computer Interaction 398 unfortunate because anthropology can provide the HCI community with an interpretive agenda, one that can help strengthen traditional HCI research. We start with an introduction to ethnography then turn to how the social context has been defined in HCI and point towards a more adequate social science approach. Thereafter we will demonstrate what this analytical "turn" can contribute to the study of technology use in the workplace. 2. Ethnography in HCI Ethnography started to appear in HCI in the 1980's. Ethnography's original role in IT research was critical, drawing attention to the failure of conventional research methods to capture the differing perspectives on the use situation (Crabtree, 2004). It pointed to and stressed the importance of the daily routines of the users' workday, the practical management of organizational contingencies, "the taken-for-granted, shared culture of the working environment, the hurly-burly of social relations in the work place, and the locally specific skills (e.g., the 'know-how' and 'know-what'), required to perform any role or task" (Anderson, 1994: 154). The formal models and methods characteristic of HCI research at the time were found to be "incapable of rendering these dimensions visible, let alone capturing them in the detail required to ensure that systems can take advantage of them" (op. cit. 154). Ethnography was thought to be a method that could access these dimensions. Ethnography, in its broadest sense, has been useful in several areas within design and system-development projects, such as examining work domain, workplaces, and work practices (e.g. Blomberg et al., 2003; Nardi, 1997; Pycock & Bowers, 1996), capturing the situatedness of specific skills (Normark, 2005), investigating the relationship between technology and work, evaluating the products and software systems i.e. conducting a sanity check on design (Hughes et al., 1994), or even acting as "user's champions" (Bentley et al., 1992: 129) and sometimes functioning as an user's advocate in development and design projects. Technology can also be seen as a vehicle for social research, which emerges through a socio-technical methodology, "technomethodology" (Button & Dourish 1996). The ethnographer's role in IT research, it is suggested, would be to identify researchable topics for design through workplace studies and use them to develop abstract design concepts and work up design-solutions (Crabtree & Rodden, 2002). However, the use of ethnography in HCI-research and particularly in design is not unproblematic (e.g.
Revealing the Socio-Technical Context of Design Settings: Toward Participatory IS Design
International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction, 2013
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