[Air-L] Methodologies for critical analysis of UX

[Roberto de Roock]

Dear colleagues,

I have a number of studies analysing digital artefacts, including websites
and video games; some of my research looks at students' ongoing engagement
with software, while in ongoing projects I analyse websites (more as
discourse analysis). The emphasis of my work is on unfolding experiences
and interactions with the designs; my interest is especially the "politics"
embedded in said designs, including semiotic elements but also the overall
"user experience" but not in the way a UX researcher would approach.
Something like what Bogost (2007) described as procedural rhetoric, “the
art of persuasion through rule-based representations and interactions,
rather than the spoken word, writing, images, or moving pictures” and “the
art of using processes persuasively” or how James Gee's (2014) unified
discourse analysis seeks to analyze software itself (well, his focus is
games) as a "communication form".

I draw on ethnography, discourse analysis, multimodality, and video
analysis (and workplace studies more generally)...but these all are
generally coming from a linguistic-biased perspective, or (in the case of
video analysis) are not flexible enough to work with different kinds of
data. I often cite Bogost and Gee, but both of their work is focused on
games, which are particular and distinct from, say, a workforce development
website - the latter is "persuasive" and seek to "shape" the user in
particular ways, just not rule-based ones in the same way games do.

Anyway, since many of you come from other fields, I'm curious about any
relevant methodologies that might function flexibly to analyse software and
websites from a kind of procedural, critical UX perspective. Hope this
question makes sense!

Cheers,

Roberto

Dr Roberto de Roock | Research Faculty | LCW at OER | National Institute of
Education
NIE5-B3-48, 1 Nanyang Walk, Singapore 637616
Tel: (65) 8709 4453 GMT+8h | Fax: (65) 6515 1992 | Email:
r.deroock at nie.edu.sg
Web: www.nie.edu.sg | www.deRoock.net |
https://nanyang.academia.edu/RobertodeRoock