Local Strategies Research and User Interactions

• In Event: Employing Local Strategies Research to Understand the User Experience (UX)

Abstract

Launched from the confluence of distinctive but overlapping fields of research, activity and inquiry, communication scholars involved in local strategies research (LSR) seek to add to the conversation currently held between human computer interaction(HCI) researchers examining social interaction (Carroll, 2013; Rogers, Sharp, & Preece, 2011), and product and service designers (Kimbell, 2011, 2012; Buchanan, 1992; Margolin & Buchanan, 1995; Norman, 2002).
Following Aakhus (2007), we begin from the premise that designers revere the values of creation, innovation, invention, intervention, redesign and reflection. Two features of extant research in design suggest a prominent role to be played by communication scholarship. First, empirical examinations of design process from a communication perspective often conclude with a call for a reconfiguration of current communication practice including reconfiguring the design process, or recalibrating the way in which interaction analysis between products/services and people occur. Second, there is tremendous potential for co-designing services and material artifacts that are much more responsive to local, cultural contexts because of the way communication research can infuse empirical, data-driven knowledge of communities into the design process. By this we mean, the construction of products and services can be improved with better methodologies for the discovery of how humans will interact with one another as they experience or interact with the material artifact itself. Put simply, we propose that there is great potential in the examination of cultural notions of personas for improving design process and designs.
We believe that the study and application “persona” creation and use can be positively enhanced. In design, notions of users are developed as inspiration for design process but often fade into the background during the creative design process, often resulting in a gap between intentional inquiry into the lives of users and the final designs (Leighter, Rudnick and Edmonds, 2013). In contrast, our LSR approach seeks to develop meaningful, empirical and robust notions of persona that can persist through the design process and, thus, provide a permanent link between investigations of users and realized products and services.

Authors

• Trudy Milburn, Taskstream

• James L. Leighter, Creighton U