The WIDE World Web

Jake McCarthy's Research Featured in New STC Intercom Article

June 3, 2009 - by Bill Hart-Davidson, from the blogs Billblog IV, WIDE World Web

WIDE researcher and recent Rhetoric & Writing MA graduate Jake McCarthy's research is featured in the article "Finding Usability in Workplace Culture" published in the June 2009 edition of Intercom, a publication of the Society for Technical Communication.

The article addresses the complexity of assessing usability in workplace settings where a myriad of factors can influence how, let alone how well, a particular technology functions. McCarthy and Hart-Davidson, co-authors of the piece, discuss the ways an ethnomethodological approach to usability analysis can be beneficial in such settings:

"Keeping an eye on office politics and entrenched practices while searching for usability issues gave us a unique view of the decisions writers made while interacting with the CMS. Instead of recording the length of time and number of steps required for people to complete tasks, we focused on the cultural motives for completing tasks differently than we had anticipated. Certain traditional usability problems turned up through our
observations, but our presence in the work environment made the workplace
culture impossible to ignore."

Though not suitable for every project, the longer "dwell time" and more in-depth relationship building that went into the project discussed by McCarthy & Hart-Davidson can be indispensable when the design of a new workplace tool is so integral to the core mission of an organization.