Defending Design Decisions With Usability Evidence: A Case Study

This paper discusses a case study on defending design decisions with usability evidence

Decision-making strategies in design meetings

This paper is about research on decision-making strategies in design meetings

Discourse Variations Between Usability Tests and Usability Reports

This article discusses the discourse variations between usability tests and usability reports

The Sword of Data: Does Human-Centered Design Fulfill Its Rhetorical Responsibility?

This article discusses human-centered design, the guiding philosophy and process for more than twenty years in the field of design from both practice and pedagogy perspectives

Progress and challenges in incorporating climate change information into transportation research and design

The vulnerability of our nation\u27s transportation infrastructure to climate change and extreme weather is now well documented and the transportation community has identified numerous strategies to potentially mitigate these vulnerabilities. The challenges to the infrastructure sector presented by climate change can only be met through collaboration between the climate science community, who evaluate what the future will likely look like, and the engineering community, who implement our societal response. To facilitate this process, the authors asked: what progress has been made and what needs to be done now in order to allow for the graceful convergence of these two disciplines? In late 2012, the Infrastructure and Climate Network (ICNet), a National Science Foundation-supported research collaboration network, was established to answer that question. This article presents examples of how the ICNet experience has shown the way toward a new generation of innovation and cross-disciplinary research, challenges that can be address by such collaboration, and specific guidance for partnerships and methods to effectively address complex questions requiring a cogeneration of knowledge

The user -centered design process: Novice designers' use of evidence in designing from data

This dissertation investigates the connections between rhetorical theory and usability practice within the decision-making meetings of novice designers. In particular, this study investigates the evidence used by the novice designers, specifically evidence borne out of user-centered research, to support or refute a claim. For one year, the decision-making meetings of a group of approximately 20 novice designers who were working on a real task for a real client were recorded and observed. This group was dedicated to the principles of user-centered design and had been charged by their client to do more user-centered research than is typical for a design project. The year-long descriptive case study reveals two major results. First, over 40% of the claims made by the group have no spoken support whatsoever. Second, when evidence is given to support a claim, only 27.6% of the time is that support given in a manner that references an authority, a written text, or a usability finding (a type of evidence I modify from Kuhn (1991) to call "fact-based evidence"). Instead, 70.5% of the time, these novice designers use hypothetical stories or designer opinion (what I call "pseudoevidence") to support a claim. This reliance on pseudoevidence is surprising, given that a large portion of their time was dedicated to activities associated with user-centered research—activities that would ostensibly produce ready-made fact-based evidence. Further, though these designers claim to be advocates of user-centered design, their lack of fact-based evidence suggests that these novice designers may be doing something more akin to designer-centered design than user-centered design. While there are many possible reasons why this group relied on pseudoevidence, in this dissertation I analyze two possible reasons. First, I investigate this group's use of high-order abstractions in a particular construction that McGee terms "ideographs." I find that one specific community-established ideograph is used almost completely within pseudoevidence, draws discussions quickly to a close, and always enables the speaker to have his or her claim adopted by the group. Thus, it appears that this ideograph located within pseudoevidence is a powerful persuasive device. Second, I investigate pseudoevidence in terms of face (Goffman) and politeness (Brown and Levinson). While I anticipated that fact-based evidence would be more face-threatening than pseudoevidence (leading the group to use pseudoevidence more frequently), I find that fact-based evidence and pseudoevidence are equally highly face-threatening for this group. I suggest that, for this group, being inefficient is more egregious than threatening face. Therefore, pseudoevidence, which may be perceived by this group to be more efficient than fact-based evidence, is used by the designers more readily than the apparently equally face-threatening fact-based evidence. This research is an early descriptive assessment of novice designers' use of evidence. Clearly, more research is needed to determine if this group's use of evidence is idiosyncratic, to develop other explanations for the predominance of pseudoevidence, and to identify the implications of these findings on user-centered design theory and pedagogy

[Review] Communications and Management at Work

This article reviews the book "Communication and Management at Work," by Thomas Klikauer. The book, intended primarily for scholars of management, business, and organizational communication, invokes the theories of Kant, Habermas, Orwell, and Marx to assess at a macro level the historical and contemporary relationships between communication and control in the workplace