"Rhetorical Web Design: Thinking Critically about Ready-Made Web Templates and the Problem of Ease"

Jason Tham

Jason Tham is a PhD student in the Rhetoric and Scientific and Technical Communication program at the University of Minnesota in Twin Cities. His current research includes connected knowledge making and sharing, digital and visual rhetorics, and new inventions in writing and communication technology. His scholarly works have appeared in Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, Intercom, and Digital America: Journal of Digital Culture and American Life.

Contents

Abstract

Introduction

Of Ease & Efficiency: The Problem with Template-Driven Web Designs

Agency, Techne, and Extreme Usability

Agency, Techne, and Extreme Usability

Analysis of a Template: WordPress.com

Analysis of a Template: WordPress.com Cont.

Recommendations & Conclusion

Works Cited

Appendices

Agency, Techne, and Extreme Usability, Cont.

Second, as web developing and designing helps individuals to think through the ways in which design functions to make meaning and produce identities––through deciding how objects and texts appear on the interface and determining how people see and read them––the loss of design agency “might lead to less critical consciousness not only about the meaning design conveys but also the ways in which that meaning is enmeshed with the world around us” (Arola, 2010).

Our cultural understanding of technological usability can also be juxtaposed with the ancient concept of techne. The term is described as the skill or knowledge on which a craftsperson (the web developer/designer) relies to shape raw materials (objects, shapes) into useful objects (websites), whether discursive or material. Robert Johnson (2010) reminds us that techne was not only associated with the production of an object, but was also concerned with the knowledge of the object’s use and “thus was indelibly imbued with concepts of human action and ethics.” As the notion of usability has transitioned from user-friendly design, to user-centered design, to user experience design, the streamlined “ease” of product use and interface engineering has become a central concern in web designing (Salvo, 2012; Lindsley, 2013; Krug, 2005; Norman, 1990). Novice users and designers are becoming less apt in problem solving and judging the values of interfaces. The ceding of such abilities is the subject of Bradley Dilger’s (2007) critique of consumerist values of “ease” and simplicity driving current work in usability studies, a trend he calls “extreme usability.”

Dilger points out that many usability evangelists such as Jakob Nielsen and Don Norman focus on making consumers’ lives easier and avoiding the tedious work of figuring technology out for themselves. Steve Krug (2005), in his best-selling usability manifesto Don’t Make Me Think, has gone even further to make these consumerist values center to usability. Dilger (2007) argues that this version of usability, in extending the ideology framework of “ease” and consumerist values of speed and convenience, encourages an “out-of-pocket rejection of difficulty and complexity” and that it “displaces agency and control to external experts, and represses critique and central use of technology in the name of productivity and efficiency.” The impact on the novice user is that the “frictionless and transparent nature of extreme usability becomes self-perpetuating; because novice users develop only instrumental knowledge of a system…their need for extreme usability––and their need for the system to know their ‘needs’––can be perpetual” (Dilger, 2007). Lindsley (2013) summarizes that such perpetuation to rely on novice/expert binary disconnects novice users from the cultural and historical contexts of their technologies.