Dear Danny: Thank you for the prompt and thoughtful response to the CFP. Since you replied to the AIR list, I hope you won't mind if I respond in the same forum.

My intent is not to denounce usability, as I hope other portions of my CFP make clear, but to advance the very dialogue between the traditions of humanities-based writing/design and the science of usability which your own experiences seems to embody. I hope you'll consider contributing an abstract to the collection. In compiling it, I certainly don't intend to favor of one side or the other since the point is ultimately to move forward.

If I didn't find usability so useful , I wouldn't feel compelled to try to reconcile it--or at least to try dialogically to engage it with--the creative/expressive assumptions of my own experiences in the humanities (rhetoric/comp, creative writing, computer-assisted composition, literary studies, publishing, online education, etc.). I'm more interested in the energy of the dialogue than in any final resting place "beyond."

You're right that I _am_ very familiar with Jacob Nielsen, whose work I assign in my classes. Each semester, my students and I learn much from his work while having a lively debate with him. I can tell you he holds his own. I acknowledge that parts of my CFP may have borrowed from the style of his broad brush, which seems fair and even necessary.

Best wishes, - Craig

At 02:35 PM 8/21/02 +1200, you wrote:

In my view, this CFP is a severe misreading of usability discourse. I wonder
whether the author of this CFP has read anything other than Nielsen (whose
autocratic approach is well known) in the field of usability? A brief look
at scholarly work in the HCI field, or the broader area of web design
(Shredoff, Veen) would show the lie of the "common wisdom" straw man of
usability hegemony this CFP constructs.

Most contemporary usability discourse *relies* on a profound recognition of
content/ form preferences of different audiences, backed by specific
ethnographic fieldwork. It *encourages* diverse ways of engaging with
material - from full-screen shockwave presentations to methods that provide
a satisfying experience for a sight-impaired person using a reader over a
slow modem. Usability discourse in the ethnographic mode is often ignored by
companies and individuals *precisely* because it requests a facility in the
design for different modes of expression - which most people put in the too
hard basket. Whole languages like XML/XSLT are constructed to encourage
diversity in presentation.

"Beyond Usability" is the same kind of title as "Beyond politics" - it fails
to do the basic background reading on the various uses of usability in Human
Computer Interaction, instead writing off the discipline as it promotes its
own *particular* approach to HCI as some kind of intellectually superior
framework.

Sorry to sound so cross, but I work primarily in the humanities, and come
from a design background. I put a lot of work into trying to emphasise the
relevance of humanities disciplines to design students. The
self-congratulatory tendency of humanities theoreticians to speak with
authority on stuff they know nothing about is depressingly obvious in this
CFP, and the reiteration of the art/science divide ignores all the great
work people are doing in this area.

Danny

craig stroupe wrote on 21/8/02 7:31 AM:

> More than a common-sense focus on writing or designing for an intended user,
> usability is founded on a narrowly instrumentalist view of language and
> design. That is, the form of a site, from a usability perspective, is merely
> a neutral container for the content, which always carries the same meaning
> regardless of the presentation, expression or performance. In usability
> terms, writing or design that calls attention to itself is bad writing/design
> because it fails to convey the message transparently.

> CONTEXT:
>
> Since usability guru Jacob Nielsen declared the "end of web design" in a July
> 2000 column--see <http://www. <http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20000723.html>
> useit.com/alertbox/20000723.html <http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20000723.html>
common wisdom has held that the age of experimentation and exploration in Web
design is over, and that the practices of digital communication now require a
very high degree of standardization, conventionalization, and predictability
> >-

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