USER-CENTERED TECHNOLOGY: A RHETORICAL THEORY FOR COMPUTERS AND OTHER MUNDANE ARTIFACTS

Robert R. Johnson. 1998. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. [ISBN 0-7914-3932-1 195 pages, including references and index. $19.95 (softcover).]

Robert R. Johnson’s User-centered technology presents a challenging view of many aspects of technical communication that many of us take for granted. Through an artful treatment of familiar subjects such as users, usability, texts, interfaces, technology, and the design process, Johnson opens a Pandora’s box of issues and questions that demand our attention as individuals and as a discipline.

Although it covers many topics and argues many interesting points, Johnson’s book has three basic themes:

• Technical communicators must acknowledge their ethical role and responsibility to collaborate with users when designing products.
• Users (and technical communicators) must become an active force in determining the direction of technology rather than letting technology determine how we live and work.
• Technical communicators can borrow from other fields to build a theoretical foundation for technical communication, but we must also define our own theoretical materials.

Using ancient rhetoric as a starting point, Johnson explains that the ancient Greeks "treated technology as an art whose end was in the use of the product, not in the design or making of the product itself" (13). Returning to this ancient approach, Johnson argues that users should be the ends of the user-centered design process, not the system. While this may sound obvious to many of us, we find through Johnson’s historical review that the field we think of as the most user-centered, human factors, often places the designer’s goals over the needs of the users. Johnson shows how human factors historically has treated the designers as experts and users merely the recipients of the designer’s image. He also points out the historically economic and technological focus of human factors over concerns for the social good.

To improve the system-centered model practiced by many human factors experts, Johnson proposes a new model of user-centered design, which he calls "the complex." In the traditional model (Designer > System > User), the users and the designers do not interact; instead, the user must adapt to the designer’s model of use usually relayed through the documentation. Johnson treats the issues of the user, the designer, and the system in great detail. He argues that users have more to offer than they have been allowed in the past, and that "user knowledge is always situated." He concludes that we need to interact with real people in their workplace doing real-world tasks to know how to design a usable product, and we need to include them throughout the entire design process.

In his proposed user-centered design model, Johnson denotes three points of a triangle (user tasks/system actions, artisans/designers, artifact/system). He places the user at the center of the triangle, and surrounds the triangle with the situation, which influences every aspect of the design process.

Johnson’s argument for a user-centered design process is an ethical appeal. He is especially concerned with who controls the design process and, therefore, the final product. He explains that users have been portrayed traditionally as idiots and, consequently, not worthy to participate in the design process. Rather, expert designers have created a product based on ideal users to which the real users must adapt. Traditionally, technical communicators have tried to reveal this system image through documentation, but the most they have been able to accomplish under this approach (after the product has been developed) is to make user documentation friendlier.

To create user-centered products, Johnson argues that the designers must relinquish some of their power over the final product to the users, inviting them into the design process from the very beginning and maintaining an ongoing dialogue with them. Indeed, users must be the ends of the design process. Johnson portrays this decision more as an ethical dilemma of fairness and a political propensity toward democracy than as one of necessity, although he certainly points out the long-term benefits to companies who follow such a process.

One of the most interesting crossovers of theory that Johnson brings to technical communication is technology studies. He uses history, philosophy, and sociology to explain the role of technology in society and its relationship to users. Pressing this argument, Johnson appeals to us both as designers and as users.

As designers, we can get so caught up in the endless cycle of technological improvements that we forget the true end of technology, to improve our society. Johnson reminds us that we have to make decisions based on the direction that accomplishes the best (and not just most cost-efficient) end result. Of course, this has implications for our latest craze to move every piece of information online, which may have started with a concern for the end users but has been driven more and more by cost concerns and a fascination with the technology of the online medium. As users, we must also take a stand, not against technology, but also not blindly for it to the extent that we embrace new technology because it is new rather than because it fulfills a higher purpose.

Part of what makes this book so engaging is the passion that the reader can sense behind the theory. The book is really a call to arms. Johnson calls on technical communicators to expand their roles into such areas as product planning and interface design, and he calls for users to assert their responsibility and right to control the direction and use of technology. He does not encourage such actions for our own self-importance or professional survival. Rather, he believes, like the ancient rhetoricians, that we must consider the ethical dimensions of our profession. We do not simply create well-written manuals or design better products in a vacuum; everything we do has social consequences, although they are often subtle.

In the final chapter, Johnson appeals to academia to develop "technical rhetoricians." A technical rhetorician is "a technical communicator who is trained in the theory and practice of the arts of discourse, and who practices these arts as a responsible member of a greater social order" (158). Johnson encourages us to be reflective and analytical of our actions and our profession as well as responsible and accountable.

Throughout the book, Johnson discusses the importance of building a stronger foundation of theory for technical communication, especially as it relates to analyzing and interacting with users. He warns that we can borrow and synthesize theory from other disciplines, but if we are to be taken seriously as a discipline in our own rights, we must lay out our own theories for what we do and why we do it.

Of course, Johnson’s book accomplishes this very goal. It establishes a detailed, theoretical foundation for the study of users and technology and the practice of user-centered design. You have to be patient with a book like this, because the arguments are often subtle and require definition of new terms and explanations of how other disciplines intersect with our own. However, Johnson does an excellent job of using stories about users and technology as well as quotes from other works to make the theory more approachable. This book should be required reading for graduate students in technical communication and rhetoric as well as for experienced technical communicators who desire to enhance their understanding of users, technical communication, and the user-centered design process.

Rob Houser