What is the Usability Professional Association
conference, when is it, and how can I contact this association? do they have
publications?
Also, Jay's comments about "designers preferring input only at the
beginning" didn't seem to jive with my sense of how software and hardware
design work. It seems like these design fields are constantly in flux,
seeking out problems to solve. Maybe his ideas work better for architectural
design. Also, Jay discussed the lack of research into how textbooks and
other curricula actually get used. In my study into how teachers and
students use HyperStudio multimedia authoring tools to represent knowledge,
I found that only a small fraction of their considerations seemed directly
constrained by the actual software design. The rest of it was culturally
mediated.
So, for example, to the extent that the kids had mastered the
culturally-valued semiotic conventions of a media form (graphics/audio),
they were assessed positively. When they used a media form according to less
culturally-valued semiotic goals and conventions, they were graded
negatively (i.e., using text for what Peirce would call iconic or indexical
representation instead of more symbolic, theoretical, argumentative
representation).
To me, the issue of teacher assessment in relation to how to use these
multimedia tools for learning is pretty pivotal. Teacher assessment exerts
social pressure on the kids that is at least as powerful as the actual
programmed structures of the software. (ZPD) The larger point I'm getting at
here is that, nothing in any design seems etched in stone (or silicon, for
that matter). The users (their context and their activity) negotiate the
ultimate workable design of any cultural artifact. The goal of usability
research, as far as I can understand it, is to keep chasing this butterfly,
trying to get at the problems that emerge in practice and come up with
adequate responses...
Louise Yarnall