Usability testing for oppression

Abstract

This study examines a document produced by the United States Department of Homeland Security handed out to immigrant parents during the "Family Separation Policy" crisis of 2018. The article examines whether such a document could be ethically tested for usability. Ultimately, the text argues that by the standards of the Belmont Report and the best practices in usability research, such a document would be extremely difficult (if not impossible) to test ethically. It argues that, while usability testing is an excellent tool for exploring how users interact with texts that can have life-changing consequences, it may also be used as a tool to perpetuate injustice and marginalize potential users.

Trans Oppression Through Technical Rhetorics: A Queer Phenomenological Analysis of Institutional Documents

“…The field of technical communication has also examined the intersection of rhetoric, identity, and oppression, including topics of racial oppression (Haas, 2012;Jones, 2016Jones, , 2017Jones et al, 2016;Williams, 2012), gender (Durak, 1997;Frost, 2016;Petersen, 2014;Petersen & Walton, 2018), immigration (Bartolotta, 2012), sexuality (Bowdon, 2004;Brouwer, 1998;Cox, 2019;Grabill, 2000;Ouellette, 2014), voter disenfranchisement (Jones & Williams, 2018), and other areas of society where justice and oppression intersect with technical rhetorics, which encourages "thinking about how to critically communicate with public audiences about specialized information" and its persuasive nature (Frost & Eble, 2015, p. 1). Further, technical communication has become aware of analytical lenses that are intersectional (Crenshaw, 1989(Crenshaw, , 1991.…”