A talk given by Adrienne Massanari, Assistant Professor at Loyola University - Chicago, at the 2009 IA Summit.

2. or… all I need to know about IA I’ve learned from 20 th century French philosophy

3. Who am I?

4. I’m supposed to be a “user advocate”… But I have no idea who these people are.

6. (1) Beginnings

8. Users, content, and context

9. (2) Why discourse?

15. (3) Images of the “user”

17. Theme 1: The “stupid user”

18. Theme 2: Users as victims of bad design

19. Theme 2 (cont’d.): Designers as heroes

20. Theme 3: Users as co-designers From Becky Stern’s Body-Technology interface project (http://sternlab.org/2008/04/body-technology-interfaces/)

21. (4) Personas and politics

22. … Merely being a victim of a problem doesn’t automatically bestow on one the power to see its solution…. [Thus] we make up pretend users and design for them . We call these pretend users personas , and they are the necessary foundation of good interaction design. - Alan Cooper & Robert Reimann, About Face 2.0

28. Few users users are consciously aware of or are able to clearly articulate their goals…[and]…tend to focus on low-level tasks. - Alan Cooper & Robert Reimann, About Face 2.0

29. … half of the personas out there are entirely made up, with no user research to back them. In most cases, no one on the design team has talked directly to users to find out who they are, so designers come up with an idea of a user type. The resulting personas are like the designer’s imaginary friends. - Dan Saffer, “Persona Non Grata”

30. Rather than describing a feature for ‘infrequent large-scale Fortune 1000 purchasers who use SAP,’ you can say, ‘it’s for Leonard’ and marketing, engineering, and design will know the qualities of the audience and how they will use the feature…. The rest of the benefits of the procedure…are side effects of this communication benefit. - Mike Kuniavsky, Observing the User Experience

32. (5) Implications and conclusions

36. What if usability problems cannot be neatly divided into cause and symptoms? If so, it is difficult for designers to be heroes (or for workers to be victims…) because there is no tyrant to overthrow, no dragon to slay…. That means that workers’ innovations and the destabilizations they encounter become more important for designers to examine as they attempt to find ways to contribute – as partners. - Clay Spinuzzi, Tracing Genres Through Organizations

38. (6) Thanks! (Q & A)