A CRITICAL GLANCE AT USER CENTERED PARTICIPATORY DESIGN & ITS IMPLICATIONS FOR MARKETING
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Marketing as a technical and professional communications field has been historically oriented in a top-down, producer to consumer information distribution framework. Marketers develop a campaign to promote a particular product, organization, or brand, and then distribute information through disparate media channels to be seen by “consumers.” Users typically have little to no say as to when they interact with these forms of communication, how they interact with marketing media, and ultimately the ways in which these forms of communication are created. This is why marketing and communications institutions are struggling to maintain credibility; their users are skeptical or even cynical of their communicative productions due to mass marketing and communications’ problematic history of failure to understand and address users’ values in textual production (Deuze, 2005). This consumer skepticism can be seen in regards to a wide variety of marketing campaigns. Consumers were shown to be more skeptical of health claims made in food advertisements than they were of claims made on food labels (Mitra, Hastak, Ringold, & Levy, 2019). Consumers were also shown to distrust green marketing messages from not-for-profit environmental organizations due to the deceitful marketing techniques employed by Astroturf organizations, corporation backed coalitions masquerading as grassroots-based citizen groups (Yoon & Oh, 2016) as well as green marketing techniques in general due to inauthentic greenwashing practices (Musgrove, Choi, & Cox, 2018). Modern day consumers are also distrustful of political media and advertisement, citing wariness of discrepancies between political advertisement/campaign promises and politicians’ actions once elected (Gruber & Dunway, 2017).
Users’ inherent biases towards such communicative forms are not unfounded, for even today marketing and mass-media communication organizations are failing to adapt in order to meet the standards of content generation for the modern “prosumer,” whose networking capabilities with other prosumers effectively form more multitudinous, complex, and self-aware markets to address. As the previous examples show, many modern-day marketing campaigns are purposefully misleading, and only serve to negatively impact public perceptions of similar marketing endeavors in the future. As such, marketing communicators need to consider the ways in which they can complicate and metamorphose their previous “one-way show-and-tell ad” (Auletta, 2005) tendencies, especially considering that despite the fact that media has become “inescapably pervasive in the everyday lives of people… [and] we are using more media than ever before in history…engagement with media does not translate into more attention” (Deuze, 2005).
In essence, forcing prosumers into a consumer-only embodiment is detrimental, and merely ensuring that users receive marketing material does not guarantee that they’ll interact with said material in impactful ways. As such, I argue that the answer to marketing and communication departments’ woes lies in the research and rhetoric being explored in the scholarship within the field of technical and professional communication, in particular, scholarship revolving around usability and participatory design frameworks. Investigation into usability, what constitutes it, and the ways in which produced texts and media are received by users has only recently been investigated by technical and professional communication researchers. But, the underlying principles of these theories are not new, and the idea of user engagement is mainstream within marketing practice. However, the ways in which usability has been implemented into marketing practice has not yielded a space where textual creation is collaborative and user-centered. Thus, these theories have the potential to inform a shift in marketing communications from a producer-consumer model of content production to a co-dependent and co-creative model of production.
This progression will work to dissolve previously existing user biases towards marketing departments’ credibility and aid marketers in producing content that is both more effective and satisfactory for their audiences to interact with in accordance with the tenets of usability. I begin my argument by performing a brief outline of the investigation of usability by scholars in the field of technical and professional communication, broaden usability’s current scope, and trace usability’s gradual evolution into discussions of participatory design and user centered design. I also seek to complicate and combine principles from both of these design methodologies in order to shed light on the ways in which user centered design and participatory design, when so frequently considered as oppositional terms and employed in isolation from one another, have led to problematic and incomplete utilizations in marketing contexts. My newly proposed design framework removes prior mis-conceptualizations of the marketer as sole determiner of the activities underlying content production and suggests large and long-lasting implications for the future of marketing as a discipline through implementation of usability and user-centered design best practices, shedding light on the discipline’s potential to break new ground in garnering approval/acceptance of marketing’s cooperative legitimacy amongst a progressively more jaded public.
Although usability as an analytical practice had been used for some time in the mid twentieth century in fields like computer science and software design, the term usability wasn’t truly concretized and adopted for technical communication practices until close to the turn of the millennium with the development of the seminal text A Practical Guide to Usability Testing (Dumas and Redish, 1999). Moreover, the term usability wasn’t standardized by the International Organization for Standardization (IOS) for technical communication until around the same time. (ISO, 1993). Now, usability has become an integral research question and pedagogical instrument in the field of technical and professional communication. Moreover, the term has been expanded and built upon by work related to user centered design (Salvo, 2001), cultural usability and localization (Sun, 2006), civic engagement (Simmons & Zoeteway, 2012), and other directions of inquiry. One of these directions of inquiry is in exploration of the notion of User Experience (UX).
According to the IOS, usability is understood as pertaining to three main categories. The first of these categories is effectiveness, or “a user’s ability to achieve specific goals in the environment” being analyzed. Next is the notion of efficiency, defined as “the resources used when performing a system-supported task.” The third and final category of usability is satisfaction, determined by the “user’s comfort level and acceptance of the system overall” (Zaharias, 2004). More often than not these three tenets of usability have been understood and focalized through the perspective and desires of the producer. The communication in question is determined effective if it gets the user to achieve a “specific goal,” and traditionally these goals and the variables that determine if these goals have been achieved are set out by and determined by the producer of the communication in question. This focus on prioritizing producer goals is even present in notions of User-Experience (UX) design theory. UX proponents claim that the theory “focuses on having a deep understanding of users, what they need, what they value, their abilities, and also their limitations. It also takes in to account the business goals and objectives of the group managing the project” (User Experience Basics, 2019). However, this framework of UX, ironically, is still rather producer-oriented, in that it’s up to producers to determine what users need, and the framework tends to shy away from encouraging collaborative or co-construction of texts. In fact, Peter Morville, the author of one of Usability.gov’s key sources for UX says in his piece “User Experience Design” that he is “still not convinced [user centered design] exists outside the realm of theory” (Morville, 2004). This is highly problematic considering that usability.gov, a website which seeks to be a comprehensive source on usability/UX and is one of the most easily accessible sources related to these topics, is not prioritizing or providing space for inquiries of user centered design and participatory design.
This focus merely falls in line with previous understandings of usability as focalized through the perspective and desires of the producer. The communication in question is determined effective if it gets the user to achieve a “specific goal”, and traditionally these goals and the variables that determine if these goals have been achieved are laid out and determined by the producer of the communication in question. Much scholarship within the field of technical communication has supported such a way of perceiving usability. Take for example Steve Krug’s influential Don’t Make me think!: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, in which Krug prioritizes the condensation of usability testing to accommodate producer deadlines and the agile growth of industry over more thorough approaches to usability testing. Krug’s approach to usability focuses on maximizing efficiency and effectiveness over satisfaction in the usability testing process, an approach which considers mostly users’ ability to accomplish tasks that fulfill producers’ predetermined goals (Krug, 2000). However, it is important, and indeed vital, for the field of marketing and communications to account for the goals of users within a particular communicatory environment. This call for a shift in perspective when it comes to usability is not a novel suggestion. Huatong Sun (2006) has argued in her insightful work highlighting the need for privileging of user localization that “localization specialists… design for operational differences—the properties of a technology that afford nonconscious and automatically performed functions—and instrumental affordances—the properties of a technology that support goal directed actions in the material context,” and in so doing these design specialists tend to neglect the “possible design options for social affordances—the properties of a technology that support object-oriented activity and social behaviors” (p. 460). There tends to be a divide between usability theorists and usability practitioners revolving around the feasibility of accounting for social affordances in textual production, with most theorists arguing for its integration into practice while most practitioners argue it to be a burden to efficiency (which is likely why a lot of practitioners celebrate takes on usability such as Krug’s.)
However, accounting for and prioritizing user determined goals and activities in textual production is far from impossible. In Simmons and Zoeteway’s “Productive Usability: Fostering Civic Engagement and Creating more Useful Spaces for Public Deliberation,” the authors discuss the ways in which governmental institutions determined for users the specific goals that they believed users were meant to achieve on a civic engagement website, but then changed their usability metrics in order to accommodate user values and consequently increased user satisfaction with their sites. These institutions surmised that the main purpose of these domains was to provide users with information, i.e. they served an educational purpose. However, Simmons and Zoeteway mention that users of these websites also had their own goals in mind when interacting with these civic engagement sites, notably, the desire to enact social and institutional change as well as participation in the construction of knowledge and solutions to environmental and social problems by interacting with these sites. As Simmons and Zoeteway (2012) state: “civic online spaces can provide citizens with effective resources to solve problems in their communities but only if the web site development takes into account the literary practices that citizens must adopt to make sense of the information and what counts as useful information for these citizens” (p. 251).
The emphasis in this quote is my own, because Simmons and Zoeteway echo in this quote my assertion that developers of communication forms need to consider and address user goals and qualifications for what makes a text effective when constructing it, rather than constructing on their own what factors will determine a text as effective. In the rest of the study, Simmons and Zoeteway (2012) investigate the unforeseen benefits of involving users in the design process of these civic engagement websites, outlining the ways in which the “enhanced usability approach” of integration of these users and their goals and desires into textual construction lends itself to “account for…different aims than those envisioned for [users] by designers,” (p. 252). This integration aids in the development of a new understanding of what makes a text effective or useful, which expands upon the notions of efficiency and effectiveness as outlined in the International Organization for Standardization’s explication of the terms. Simmons and Zoeteway (2012) quote Mirel (2004) when they say that usefulness, in the context of user integration outlined within their work, now comes to be understood as the “ability to do better work, not just to use an application more easily,” (p. 252).
The internet and digital media have evolved to afford more engagement of the user than ever before and in more ways than before, and indeed, user engagement tends to be expected of those producing media in digital contexts. It is concerning that with the affordances granted by current technological advancements, technical communicators in the marketing sector have yet to truly optimize their content to appeal to the user at the design and engagement level, giving users a seat at the table when it comes to deciding how best to design an application so that it can do “better work”. If civic website creators in the late 2000s to early 2010s can thoroughly and reflexively involve users in the co-creation of texts as demonstrated by Simmons and Zoeteway’s piece, then surely technical communicators can do so now with the contemporary tools and practices available to them.
However, I find that marketing communications as a whole is pushing back on committing to a shift towards catering to user experience for two reasons. Firstly, marketers tend to lay out at the beginning of their design process exactly what it is they hope their users take away from a particular message. More often than not this take-away revolves around increased acceptance and approval of the product, institution, or brand being marketed to users. At the end of the day, marketing materials are meant to sell products, brands, or ideas, and this goal perpetuates the creation of content for users rather than the creation of content in tandem with users. Secondly, marketers have traditionally oriented their communicative forms as employing a top-down, producer to consumer distribution framework which involves users only at the base level of engagement. User engagement is a problematic term in that it tends to place emphasis on user involvement at the site of the end of a communication’s development cycle; users are consulted after construction of marketing communications rather than throughout the design process. User engagement is also often hailed as the end-all be-all of marketing effectiveness. For instance, the effectiveness of a social media post for a higher education institution is likely measured by engagement of users with the post in the form of likes, shares, comments, and further user actions taken such as interaction with other institution branded content and media. However, what this method of measurement is lacking is an understanding of what users take away from interaction with their content. Did users gain new insights into the workings of the institution who produced the post? Did users find the marketed media useful in enabling them to make further informed interaction with the institution and its content? When focusing on user-engagement, marketers fall prey to the producer-oriented heuristics of thought as outlined by usability and determine satisfaction in terms of user “acceptance” of the communication presented them and the institution which produced its values and goals. However, when communicators focus on user-involvement and participatory design frames of analysis, they consider user satisfaction by measuring users’ perceived value of a text as well as the extent to which they are being valued by a text.
This notion of being valued by the text and its benefit on long-term user interaction with content is made quite evident in Simmons and Zoeteway’s (2012) work on civic engagement websites. As outlined by result of their study, Simmons and Zoeteway determined that “users’ subjective online experiences are likely to test well if the user feels their needs are met by the system,” (p. 269). The addressing and accommodation of users’ need to feel valued thus lends itself to increased feelings of user satisfaction when engaging with content, specifically when “[users] were able to contribute and their contributions were valued. Users found contributing fun, and that pleasure and us[e]ability were strongly connected,” (Simmons and Zoeteway 2012, p. 269). This notion of tailoring communication towards the satisfaction of users when interacting with content rather than tailoring communication towards producers’ perceived effectiveness and efficiency of communications’ ability to achieve producer goals is especially important to technical communicators working in mass media considering the aforementioned increase of distrust that users feel towards mass media communications (Deuze, 2005).
Therefore, in order to make marketing content that is effective in achieving pre-meditated producer goals, establishing a loyal user base, and building and maintaining user trust, marketers should transition towards utilizing participatory and user centered design principles which prioritize the provision of social affordances. Unfortunately, user centered and participatory design are terms often juxtaposed with one another rather than used in tandem with one another. As Clay Spinuzzi (2005) so succinctly summates of N. Iivari’s (2004) discussion of the differences between user centered and participatory design: “what distinguishes participatory design from related approaches such as user centered design is that the latter supposes only that the research and design work is done on behalf of the users; in participatory design, this work must be done with users,” (p.165). Spinuzzi frames participatory design as an ideal and progressive development on the notions of user engagement associated with user centered design and pays particular attention to the ways in which participatory design incorporates user involvement in the design process. However, involvement in design does not necessarily always ensure that texts are produced to also function on behalf of users rather than on behalf of producers’ desired effects. This is especially true in marketing practices, where user needs and desires are often not consulted in the design process of texts, likely because producers’ end goal is to produce a text that elicits a particular response from users, and either consciously or subconsciously, these responses are elicited subliminally in order to amplify the persuasive nature of marketing content. However, user oriented and catered marketing creates a relationship between user and producer that I argue establishes a stronger bond between stakeholders than subliminal marketing is capable of, and it is this construction of relationships between user and producer which will effectively work to dissolve the barriers to engagement and user-perceived authenticity of marketed content. As Huatong Sun and Guiseppe Getto (2017) say, “at a time when global cultural flow has shifted from a diffusion model to a participatory model…more relationship building work…will be needed to address the increasing demand for community building,” (p. 92). In other words, information is being circulated increasingly more through media which encourage participatory and user centered design such as social media platforms, however producers are not taking advantage of these unique affordances to incorporate the user into marketing content design. In order to establish relationships as encouraged by Sun, producers must first gain the trust of their users, convincing users that their motivations are authentic in terms of their desire to engage with users, instead of only engaging the user. Establishing trust requires thorough involvement of and transparency with users in the design process.
What I argue for is the intersection of user centered design and participatory design in order to create a new framework for user engagement within marketing. User centered design seeks to do work on behalf of users, and although an admirable thought, more often than not producers tend to assume what would be best for users without consulting them on what they think is best for themselves. Conversely, producers can consult users in the textual design process (typically in the form of focus groups or other feedback mechanisms, inherently problematic in of themselves due to their end of cycle design focus) but do not always incorporate or utilize user input to construct texts on their behalf. Otherwise put, producers engage users, but they don’t truly invite users to participate in co-creative textual production methodologies. Thus, we must coalesce the most effective and productive elements of these two terms and employ a user centered participatory design model to constructing communications and formulating user consultation. A user centered participatory design framework will seek to not only engage users with textual production, but also reflexively and continuously incorporate their values and input into design processes. This design framework will function to proactively and reactively enhance user experience, employing the “enhanced usability approach” introduced by Simmons and Zoeteway. This framework will enable users to achieve their own goals and determine their own uses for a particular communication, especially those which producers may not account for in the design process or initial developmental planning stages of textual construction. User centered participatory design seeks to complicate what it is we as textual producers understand makes a text effective, efficient, and satisfactory for users, prioritizing textual co-creation and incorporating users’ needs and desires into a dialogic co-construction of a text that will inform a text’s design, and just as important, the trajectories it may take.
It is this goal which informs the work of this portfolio. I have applied my methodologies for user-producer and user-user construction of texts to showcase marketing strategies that demonstrate the feasibility and benefits of establishing meaningful relationships between user and producer by accounting for social affordances in textual production rather than merely operational or instrumental affordances (Sun, 2006). Specifically, I analyze the manner in which the immensely popular Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA) Videogame League of Legends utilizes community spotlights, forum boards, and community creations in order to both market their game and merchandise to users whilst also providing users with creative outlets to co-construct the League of Legends brand. I will use this to design my own marketing content for another popular video game, Rocket League, which seeks to prioritize community spotlights, video content of community highlights, and other co-creative productions such as fan art to demonstrate the benefits of participatory design in marketing content. I also analyze the manner in which interactive advertisements effectively engage users but do so at the peril of not addressing users’ satisfaction and comfort levels engaging with texts, using Simmons and Zoeteway’s (2012) article as an example of good participatory design and applying it to successful consumer generated ad campaigns. I then contrast these campaigns with forced user engagement ads and use the analysis to create my own user centered participatory design ads for fast food companies which focus on optimizing user satisfaction by means of encouraged participation and co-creation. As a result of my work, I aim to highlight the ways in which the principles user centered participatory design can be utilized feasibly and effectively in marketing content in order to build trust between producer and user and foster co-construction of content in order to develop a more satisfactory user experience and establish a more reputable relationship between marketer and user. This symbiotic relationship will lead consumers to feel valued by marketers and less skeptical of marketing materials, which will in turn help marketers to affect a wider user base and deter fewer prospective audiences.
References
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