Last week we talked about ecologies for situating users, texts, or activities. This week we want to focus on the ecologies surrounding the user. There are four generic types of user context—technological, physical, mental, social/institutional. The basic process for most usability studies is to identify particular types of users, to make some initial stabs at imagining the contexts around their engagement with a site, to find or contstruct such a context, and ultimately to observe a user's interaction with the site in that type of context. The goal is to determine problems with a site's architecture, information, or technologies so they can be solved. Today I want you to pick one of those users—probably the one you think will be the primary user—and try to map out this ecology in more detail.

Follow the heuristic guide below. Don't get caught up in filling everything out in detail. Put down initial, intuitive thoughts and move through it quickly. You may want to go back and do more detail later if you think it will be fruitful for developing your user matrix or moderator's guide.

1. Based on your final project, identify and briefly describe

• a particular USER of your site,
• elements of the partiuclar CONTEXT surrounding this user,
• and the particular ACTIVITIES you assume the user might engage in.

Example:

• GMU student, first-year, 101 composition
• on a library computer, quiet setting, focused on the task, has background experience with task from class
• looking for an article on a database, will be looking for full text articles, will use search engines as well as categorized lists

2. Brainstorm by listing or mapping elements in the local constellation or ecology surrounding the user in more detail. For example, items such as these could be elements of the user's context:

• specific people
• particular social roles within the system, ecology, culture, institution
• particular practices
• habits
• forms of imitation
• values (of the culture, institution, individual)
• attitudes
• knowledges (prior knowledge necessary or available)
• hardware used
• software used
• particular functions within the software
• genre within web site
• genre within mind of user
• partiuclar documents
• institutional texts (tutorials, manuals, help)
• institutional rules, requirements

3. Freewrite to draw inferences or conclusions about the user's activities within this ecology and the resulting relationships among these ecological elements. Think about questions such as:

• To whom does a key technology/tool belong?
• To what and to whom is a technology/tool connected?
• What activites connect a user to texts or technologies?
• What other people connect the user to technoliges or information?
• Is there a "mediator" or "keystone species" in the ecology?
• What documents form what relationships?
• Is a relationship to a text or tool unconscious or habitual?
• Does the user trust the institution or technology?
• Is the user's relationship to the topic emotional or practical? For entertainment or work?
• What is the user's level of engagement—commitment to stay with the site (per values or isntitutional demands)?
• Could the web design/documents affect the user negatively (bored, frustrated)? How?

You could also use some of the social network graphs or activity system graphs (p.100, 105) to generate some ideas here.

4. Go back through the freewriting and draw out the most important conclusions (assumptions) about the user and list possible design strategies that might grow out of this image of the user. (You might think in terms of the revsions made based on Spinuzzi's usability study. [p.115-16])

For homework, make sure you at least have an initial template page up by next class or a fairly detailed paper map/layout of your design and information architecture. This will help you construct your moderator's guide. In your template/plan, be sure to take into considereation the "display space" in which your site will need to fill an ecological niche.

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