Zobel Dissertation Abstract
Last Updated on Thursday, 29 December 2011 20:33 Written by Administrator Thursday, 29 December 2011 17:45
My dissertation researched usability, technical communication, UX, Deleuze's assemblage theory, and mobile visitors (people who used mobile devices when visiting an area they did not live).
While I intend to generate an article or two out of my research and writing, there is not enough material to post online at this point. It would either be premature or overwhelming in detail. Instead, I am posting my dissertation abstract.
This dissertation answers Redish’s call for new methods to address complex problems in usability testing and builds on the works of Albers, Howard, Redish, and Still in addressing complexity and usability. This dissertation applies Deleuze’s assemblage concept to address a complex usability problem: How can mobile visitors’ experiences in Humboldt County be improved? Addressing this specific problem of visitor experience enables this dissertation to answer a second question: How does an assemblaged information model address complexity and complex systems and thereby contribute to usability as a field?
An assemblage is an ever-changing collection of infinitely recombinable parts; when relationships between the elements change, often new actors, elements, or types emerge. While assemblage has been used to a limited extent in organization theory and analysis, philosophy, and literature, assemblage has rarely been used in practitioner-dominated fields like usability and technical communication. Given the many similarities between assemblage theory and complexity theory and systems thinking—non-linear impacts, constant change and evolution, external relations—this dissertation draws upon these fields’ findings to develop an approach to complex problems grounded by previous works in multiple fields.
This dissertation found that an assemblage approach can provide usability practitioners a means to better understand and address complex problems while using current task-centered testing methods and adding little to no cost in time, materials, or money. By seeing complex problems as assemblages, using existing methods, and gathering data from multiple stakeholder communities during the research process, practitioners can meet traditional usability client needs while also supplying insight into and understanding of complex problems. As to the problem of improving mobile visitors’ experience in Humboldt County, the most direct and cost-effective solution is to encourage locals and non-locals to provide as much useful commentary and information about local sites, restaurants, and points of interest as possible on applications and web-based resources, like Google Maps and Yelp!, which are used globally.
