From Usability Testing and Text Analysis to User- Response Criticism

Studies on user experience in the digital medium are often related to Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and the construction of user models or the performance of usability tests in order to support design and evaluation of digital artefacts. User modelling research has mainly focused on the construction of “usable” and “useful” tools providing the users with “experiences fitting their specific background knowledge and objectives” (Fischer, 2001: 65). A variety of characteristics have been used to inform such models, from demographic information (age, gender, native language) or relevant experience (novice, advanced, expert), to interests, goals and plans (general interest categories, task-related objectives/sequences of actions) or contextual information (location, time, physical environment) (Sosnovsky and Dicheva, 2010: 3334). Many of the approaches merge cognitive science and artificial intelligence (Webb et al., 2001; Biswas and Robinson, 2010; Mohamad and Kouroupetroglou, 2013), whilst usability testing, as a technique from user-centred design, often involves the iterative refinement of a prototype based on user’s feedback (Massanari, 2010). Usability studies also evaluate how a tool is actually used (Brown and Hocutt, 2015) exploring constructs such as ease of use and learnability. Other researches, from the fields of philosophy of technology or digital hermeneutics, go beyond the usefulness and usability aspects of the technology, trying to address questions related to the “human, social, cultural, ethical, and political implications of those technologies” (Fallman, 2007: 296) or to the “self-interpretation of human beings” (Capurro, 2010: 10) in the light of the code. Further directions of study propose a re-orientation of the HCI as “an aesthetic field” (Bertelsen and Pold, 2004: 23) or a cultural perspective on the “reflexive relationship between user and medium” as a “remediation” of the self (Bolter and Grusin, 2000: 230), considered as “humanistic HCI” (Bardzell and Bardzell, 2016). This article tries to bridge the fields of HCI and Digital Humanities (DH), where HCI techniques are used to evaluate tools developed in DH projects and the results of this evaluation are analysed via DH methods, with the intention of potential development inspired by the literary theory of aesthetic response (Iser, 1980). The paper elaborates on previous work (Armaselu and Jones, 2016) and presents two case studies of usability tests conducted within the framework of interface and game design for digital historical editions and digital cultural heritage (Section 2). Section 3 describes the type of analysis applied to users’ responses, whereby we propose a typology of users and interpretation of users’ experience, followed by conclusions and future work (Section 4).