Socio–instrumental Usability: IT is all about Social Action1

Abstract

Usability is an important concept that seems to receive less attention than it deserves outside of the core Human–Computer Interaction community. The reason for this apparent lack of interest may stem from an overly instrumental orientation towards usability that does not appeal to more socially oriented researchers. Three central criteria for usability, as reflected in the contemporary literature, are the effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction with which users can achieve specified goals. These criteria are often expressed in terms of achieving goals, which, at least tacitly, seem to be restricted to goals related to an instrumental view on the use of IT. To broaden this view, the paper elaborates on how the concept of usability can be understood and used within a social action context. How social goals are related to the effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction criteria is addressed specifically. It is argued that in order truly to understand usability, we must consider both instrumental and social goals since their combination constitute a fundamental part of the social action context in which systems are used. Both instrumental and social goals affect the way systems and use-situations are designed and conceived. Interpreting usability from this broad social action perspective may be a way to make the concept more accepted throughout the wide variety of areas dealing with the design of IT systems.